When Google Art Project launched in February of 2011, it was a massive step forward for the presence of art online. Using the same technology as Google Street View, the project offered what amounted to virtual tours of 17 major museums in nine countries, including such important institutions as New York's Museum of Modern Art and London's Tate Britain. As of today, that number has expanded to a staggering 134 museums in 40 countries. Though not every museum has a full-fledged tour option, each is represented by a selection of objects from their collections in high resolution.
The expansion seems to respond to criticism that the initial group of museums featured in the Google endeavor was too Eurocentric and lacked coverage of the West Coast to boot. For the project’s second round, the company sought to “balance regional museums with those that are more nationally or globally recognized,” Google’s Diana Skaar told the Los Angeles Times, and institutions that now offer full virtual tours via Google Art Project include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropologia, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Also, be sure to take a Google-enabled stroll around the White House.
Rather than capturing all of the data on site itself, Google receives the high-resolution images from the museums and posts them on the Web site, a compendium that is quickly becoming something like the Google Books Library Project (which has scanned over 20 million books from academic libraries), only for art history. Among the diverse group of browsable objects now a part of the initiative are a collection of 70 drawings on rock from the Australian Rock Art Collection, a luminous 14th-century Qur’an manuscript from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and a powerful abstraction by Imre Bak at the Hungarian National Gallery. All are worth spending some quality time online with.
One highlight is worth calling out: For the Getty, Google brought in its own equipment to shoot a seven-billion-pixel interactive digital replica of Rembrandt’s “The Abduction of Europa” (1632), the same ultra-close-up that the project has made possible for iconic works like Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (1989) at MoMA.