Google Arts & Culture
Google Cultural Institute recently launched a newGoogle Arts & Culture website and app where you can explore artworks, masterpieces and cultural icons. It's quite extensive and you could totally find yourself down a rabbit hole with your search and discoveries.
The app and website allows users to explore anything from cats in art since 200 BCE to the color red in Abstract Expressionism, and everything in between.
The new tools help discover works and artifacts, immersing them in cultural experiences across art, history and the wonders of the world—from more than a thousand museums across 70 countries.
Users can search for anything, from shoes to all things gold, scroll through art by time (see how Van Gogh’s works went from gloomy to vivid), browse by color and learn about Monet’s 50 shades of gray, find a new fascinating story to discover every day—today, it’s nine powerful men in heels.
Although nothing beats seeing these works in person, this is a great way to access art, whether for interest, research or just for the love of it. The zoom in feature is fantastic, you can see details on art work that you can't see with the naked eye especially since you can't get really close to the work at most museums.
I'm glad the UAE has a presence on the site, but the website could do with partnering with more institutes and organisations like Sharjah Art Foundation, ADMAF, Sheikha Salama Foundation, Emirates Art Foundation to be able to show more art from this country (currently the site features work from National Archives of the UAE, Barjeel Foundation and NYU Abu Dhabi's FIND)
I've not had a chance to dig too deep into the site, but do look forward to spending more time on it.
Here's a video tour:
More from the press release:
The app and website also include a new feature: The Art Recognizer, which can now be explored in London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. By pointing a phone’s camera to a painting on display, users will be able find all the information they want to know about the artwork. Google is planning to roll this out to museums around the world—so stay tuned.
With a virtual reality viewer like Google Cardboard, users can use the Google Arts & Culture app on iOS and Android to take a virtual tour of the street art scene in Rome; step inside a creation by famous street artist, Insa; or even travel 2,500 years back in time and look around the ancient Greek temple of Zeus.
Moreover, the Google Arts & Culture app helps users see some of the artworks in real life too. By clicking “Visit” on a museum’s page to get opening times, users can find out what’s on that day and navigate there in one click.
Users can also subscribe to the new Google Arts & Culture YouTube channel and find out what Kandinsky and Kanye West have in common and meet the New York-based “cyborg artist” Neil Harisson. To learn more, watch this video.