Art Selfie
: Google Arts & Culture allows people to find their fine art likeness by snapping a selfie. The app matches the user's face to old art museum portraits from Google's database. The app topped the download charts in January 2018. The feature was initially created by Cyril Diagne.
Development
The platform emerged as a result of Google's "20-percent time" policy, by which employees were encouraged to spend 20% of their time working on an innovative project of interest. A small team of employees created the concept for the platform after a discussion on how to use the firm's technology to make museum' artwork more accessible. The platform concept fit the firm's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Accordingly, in mid-2009, Google executives agreed to support the project, and they engaged online curators of numerous museums to commit to the initiative.
The platform was launched on February 1, 2011 by the Google Cultural Institute with contributions from international museums, including the Tate Gallery
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
, London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
. New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
; and the Uffizi
The Uffizi Gallery (; it, Galleria degli Uffizi, italic=no, ) is a prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy. One of the most important Italian museums ...
, Florence
Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...
. On April 3, 2012, Google announced a major expansion, with more than 34,000 artworks from 151 museums and arts organizations from 40 countries, including the Art Gallery of Ontario
The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO; french: Musée des beaux-arts de l'Ontario) is an art museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The museum is located in the Grange Park neighbourhood of downtown Toronto, on Dundas Street West between McCaul and Beve ...
, the White House
The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. ...
, the Australian Rock Art Gallery at Griffith University
Griffith University is a public research university in South East Queensland on the east coast of Australia. Formally founded in 1971, Griffith opened its doors in 1975, introducing Australia's first degrees in environmental science and Asian s ...
, the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha
The Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) is a museum on one end of the Corniche in Doha, Qatar. As per the architect I. M. Pei's specifications, the museum is built on an island off an artificial projecting peninsula near the traditional ''dhow'' harbor ...
, and the Hong Kong Museum of Art
The Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) is the first and main art museum of Hong Kong, located in Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui. It is managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Hong Kong Government. HKMoA has an art collection ...
.
Technology used
The team leveraged existing technologies, including Google Street View
Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expa ...
and Picasa
Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by ...
, and built new tools specifically for the platform.
They created an indoor-version of the camera system to capture gallery images by pushing the camera 'trolley' through a museum. It also used professional panoramic heads Clauss RODEON VR Head Hd And Clauss VR Head ST to take high-resolution photos of the artworks within a gallery. This technology allowed excellent attention to detail and the highest image resolution. Each partner museum selected one artwork to be captured at ultra-high resolution with approximately 1,000 times more detail than the average digital camera. The largest image, Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov
Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov (russian: link=no, Алекса́ндр Андре́евич Ива́нов; July 28 (July 16 Adoption of the Gregorian calendar#Adoption in Eastern Europe, S, 1806 – July 15 (July 3 S, 1858) was a Russ ...
's ''The Apparition of Christ to the People'', is over 12 gigapixels. To maximize image quality, the team coordinated with partner museums' lighting technicians and photography teams. For example, at Tate Britain
Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in ...
, they collaborated to capture a gigapixel image of ''No Woman No Cry
"No Woman, No Cry" is a reggae song by Bob Marley and the Wailers. The song was recorded in 1974 and released on the studio album ''Natty Dread''.
The live recording of this song from the 1975 album '' Live!'' was released as a single and i ...
'' in both natural light and in the dark. Tate suggested this method to capture the painting's hidden phosphorescent image, which glows in the dark. The Google camera team had to adapt their method and keep the camera shutter open for 8 seconds in the dark to capture a distinct enough image. Now, unlike at Tate, from the site, one can view the painting in both light settings.
Once the images were captured, the team used Google Street View software and GPS data to seamlessly stitch the images and connect them to museum floor plans. Each image was mapped according to longitude and latitude, so that users can seamlessly transition to it from Google Maps, looking inside the partner museums' galleries. Street View was also integrated with Picasa, for a seamless transition from gallery view to microscope view.
The user interface lets site visitors virtually 'walk through' galleries with Google Street View, and look at artworks with Picasa, which provides the microscope view to zoom in to images for greater detail than is visible to the naked eye. Additionally, the microscope view of artworks incorporates other resources—including Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...
, Google Docs
Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes: Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. Google Do ...
and YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
—so users can link to external content to learn more about the work. Finally, the platform incorporates Google's URL compacter ( Goo.gl), so that users can save and easily share their personal collections.
The resulting platform is a Java-based Google App Engine Web application, which exists on Google's infrastructure.
Technology limitations
Luc Vincent, director of engineering at Google and head of the team responsible for Street View for the platform, expressed concern over the quality of panorama cameras his team used to capture gallery and artwork images. In particular, he believes that improved aperture control would enable more consistent quality of gallery images.
Some artworks were particularly difficult to capture and re-present accurately as virtual, two-dimensional images. For example, Google described the inclusion of
Hans Holbein the Younger
Hans Holbein the Younger ( , ; german: Hans Holbein der Jüngere; – between 7 October and 29 November 1543) was a Germans, German-Swiss people, Swiss painter and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style, and is considered o ...
's ''
The Ambassadors
''The Ambassadors'' is a 1903 novel by Henry James, originally published as a serial in the ''North American Review'' (NAR). The novel is a dark comedy which follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe to bring the son o ...
'' as "tough". This was due to the
anamorphic
Anamorphic format is the cinematography technique of shooting a widescreen picture on standard 35 mm film or other visual recording media with a non-widescreen native aspect ratio. It also refers to the projection format in which a distorted ...
techniques distorting the image of a skull in the foreground of the painting. When looking at the original painting at the National Gallery in London, the depiction of the skull appears distorted until the viewer physically steps to the side of the painting. Once the viewer is looking at the shape from the intended vantage point, the lifelike depiction of the skull materializes. The effect is still apparent in the gigapixel version of the painting but was less pronounced in the "walk-through" function.
As ''New York Times'' art reviewer
Roberta Smith
Roberta Smith (born 1948) is co-chief art critic of ''The New York Times'' and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position.
Early life
Born in 1948 in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. Smith studied at ...
said: "
oogle Arts & Cultureis very much a work in progress, full of bugs and information gaps, and sometimes blurry, careering virtual tours."
Though the second-generation platform solved some technological issues, the firm plans to continue developing additional enhancements for the site. Future improvements currently under consideration include: upgrading panorama cameras, more detailed web metrics, and improved
searchability through meta-tagging and user-generated meta-tagging.
The firm is also considering the addition of an experimental page to the platform, to highlight emerging technologies that artists are using to showcase their works.
Institutions and works
Seventeen partner museums were included in the launch of the project. The original 1,061 high-resolution images (by 486 different artists) are shown in 385 virtual gallery rooms, with 6,000
Street View
Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expan ...
–style panoramas.
List of the initial 17 partner museums
Below is a list of the original seventeen partner museums at the time of the platform's launch. All images shown are actual images from Google Arts & Culture:
On April 3, 2012, Google announced the expansion of the platform to include 151 cultural organizations, with new partners contributing a gigapixel image of one of their works.
Partial list of Google Cultural Institute partners
The museum image redirects to the museum's official page on the Google Arts & Culture platform, the Google Street View logo indicates that the museum has an adapted version of Street View
Influences
The Google Art Project was a development of the
virtual museum
A virtual museum is a digital entity that draws on the characteristics of a museum, in order to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalization, interactivity, and richness of content. Virtual museums can perform as t ...
projects of the 1990s and 2000s, following the first appearance of online exhibitions with high-resolution images of artworks in 1995. In the late 1980s, art museum personnel began to consider how they could exploit the
internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
to achieve their institutions' missions through online platforms. For example, in 1994
Elizabeth Broun
Elizabeth "Betsy" Broun (born December 15, 1946 in Kansas City) is an American art historian and curator. Broun served as the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum from 1989 to 2016, and is the longest-serving f ...
, Director of the
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...
, spoke to the Smithsonian Commission on the future of art, stating: "We need to put our institutional energy behind the idea of getting the Smithsonian hooked up to the people and schools of America." She then outlined the museum's objective to conserve, protect, present, and interpret exhibits, explaining how electronic media could help achieve these goals.
The expansion of internet programs and resources has shaped the development of the platform.
Copyright issues
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...
affected the development of the platform from a non-technological perspective. Google faced a six-year-long court case relating to several
issues with copyright infringement. Google Books cataloged full digital copies of texts, including those still protected by copyright, though Google claimed it was permissible under the
fair use
Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests ...
clause. Google ended up paying $125 million to copyright-holders of the protected books, though the
settlement agreement
In law, a settlement is a resolution between disputing parties about a legal case, reached either before or after court action begins. A collective settlement is a settlement of multiple similar legal cases. The term also has other meanings in t ...
was modified and debated several times before it was ultimately rejected by federal courts. In his decision, Judge
Denny Chin
Denny Chin (陳卓光; born April 13, 1954) is a Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York City. He was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court f ...
stated the settlement agreement would "give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission," and could lead to antitrust issues. Judge Chin said in future open-access initiatives, Google should use an "opt-in" method, rather than providing copyright owners the option to "opt-out" of an arrangement.
After this controversy, Google took a different approach to intellectual property rights for the Google Arts & Culture. The platform's intellectual property policy is:
:''The high-resolution imagery of artworks featured on the platform site is owned by the museums, and these images may be subject to copyright laws around the world. The Street View imagery is owned by Google. All of the imagery on this site is provided for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the platform site, in the manner permitted by Google's Terms of Service. The normal Google Terms of Service apply to your use of the entire site.''
The partner museum staff were able now to ask Google to blur out the images of certain works, which are still protected by copyrights. In a few cases, museums wanted to include artworks by modern and contemporary artists, many of whom still hold the copyright to their works. For example, Tate Britain approached
Chris Ofili
Christopher Ofili, (born 10 October 1968) is a British Turner Prize-winning painter who is best known for his paintings incorporating elephant dung. He was one of the Young British Artists. Since 2005, Ofili has been living and working in Trin ...
to get his permission to capture and reproduce his works on the platform.
But the
Toledo Museum of Art
The Toledo Museum of Art is an internationally known art museum located in the Old West End neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio. It houses a collection of more than 30,000 objects. With 45 galleries, it covers 280,000 square feet and is currently in th ...
asked Google to remove 21 artworks from the website, including works by
Henri Matisse
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known prima ...
and other modern artists.
Praise
* Increases access to art. So long as one has internet access, anyone, anywhere, at any time can visit the Google Arts & Culture, enabling audiences who otherwise would be unlikely to visit these museums to see their works. "Armchair tourists" are now able to tour some of the world's greatest art exhibits without leaving their seats. Professors and students can go on virtual field trips without the usual associated costs, and have a remote conversation with an expert from a museum or other institution.
* Better visitor experience. Users can avoid constraints of time, money and physical difficulty. They need not plan a restrictive one-time visit to a collection, or arrive to find out work is not on view. They are not bothered by other visitors.
* Triggers new visitors Many art historians and scholars have posited that online exhibitions would drive more people to the gallery, and the Google Arts & Culture has supported this theory. The research established that there is a statistically significant relationship between those who visit the platform and those who are inspired to go on a real tour of a museum.
In further support of this concept, within two weeks of the launch of the platform, MoMA saw its website's traffic increase by about 7%.
It is, however, unclear how many physical visitors came to MoMA as a result of the platform.
* Complements real visits to a gallery. While there has been some skepticism that the Google Arts & Culture seeks to replace real-time visits to art galleries, many have suggested that the virtual tours actually complement real-time visits. Research shows that people are more likely to enjoy their real-time visit to a museum after participating in a virtual tour.
Several museum personnel have supported this concept anecdotally. Julian Raby, director of the
Freer Gallery of Art
The Freer Gallery of Art is an art museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. focusing on Asian art. The Freer and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery together form the National Museum of Asian Art in the United States. The Freer and Sac ...
stated: "The gigapixel experience brings us very close to the essence of the artist through detail that simply can't be seen in the gallery itself. Far from eliminating the necessity of seeing artworks in person,
rts & Culturedeepens our desire to go in search of the real thing." This view was shared by Brian Kennedy, director of the
Toledo Museum of Art
The Toledo Museum of Art is an internationally known art museum located in the Old West End neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio. It houses a collection of more than 30,000 objects. With 45 galleries, it covers 280,000 square feet and is currently in th ...
, who believed that academics would still want to view artwork in three dimensions, even if the gigapixel images provided better clarity than viewing the artwork in the gallery. Similarly, Amit Sood—the Google project leader—said that "nothing beats the first-person experience".
* Has future development potential. Some scholars and art critics believe the Google Arts & Culture will change how museums use the web. For instance, Nancy Proctor—Head of Mobile Strategy & Initiatives at the Smithsonian—suggested that museums may eventually utilize the platform to provide museum maps and gallery information instead of printed materials. It might become possible for museum visitors to hold up their smartphone in front of an artwork, and the platform could overlay information. the platform could also provide a seamless transition from a Google Map to an inside gallery map, avoiding the need for printed collateral.
* Democratization of culture. With the rapid increase of information that is available online, we are in a period of
democratization of knowledge
The democratization of knowledge is the acquisition and spread of knowledge amongst a wider part of the population, not just privileged elites such as clergy and academics. Libraries, in particular public libraries, and modern digital technolog ...
. An elite group of professionals and experts are no longer the only people with the ability to distribute respected information. Rather, through web-based initiatives like Wikipedia, anyone with web access can contribute to and help shape public knowledge.
* Democratizing Art. The Google Arts & Culture is, according to some, a democratic initiative. It aims to give more people access to art by removing barriers like cost and location. Some art or cultural exhibits have been limited to a small group of viewers (e.g. PhD students, academic researchers) due to deteriorating conditions of work, lack of available wall space in a museum, or other similar factors. Digitized reproductions, however, can be accessible to anyone from any location. This type of online resource can transform research and academia by opening access to previously exclusive artworks, enabling multidisciplinary and multi-institutional learning. It provides people the opportunity to experience art individually, and a platform to become involved in the conversation.
For example, the platform now lets users
contribute their own content, adding their insight to the public collection of knowledge.
* Shift away from the canon of high art. Many scholars have argued that we are experiencing a breakdown of the canon of high art,
and the Google Arts & Culture is beginning to reflect this. When it just included the Grand Masters of Western Art, the project faced strong
criticism
Criticism is the construction of a judgement about the negative qualities of someone or something. Criticism can range from impromptu comments to a written detailed response. , ''"the act of giving your opinion or judgment about the good or bad q ...
. As a result of this outburst, the website now includes some indigenous and graffiti artworks. This platform also provides a new context through which people encounter art, ultimately reflecting this shift away from the canon of high art.
Criticism
*
Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism (also Eurocentricity or Western-centrism)
is a worldview that is centered on Western civilization or a biased view that favors it over non-Western civilizations. The exact scope of Eurocentrism varies from the entire Western worl ...
: During its initial launch, many critics argued that Google Arts & Culture provided a Western-biased representation of art. Most museums included in the first phase of the Project were from Western Europe, Washington, DC, and New York, NY. According to Diana Skaar, head of partnerships for the platform, Google responded: "After the launch of round one, we got an overwhelming response from museums worldwide. So for round two, we really wanted to balance regional museums with those that are more nationally or globally recognized."
Now, the platform's expanded repository includes graffiti works, dot paintings, rock art, and indigenous artworks.
* Selection of content: Although the Google Arts & Culture now partners with 134 new museums, some critics believe it still may present a skewed representation of art and art history. Google and the partner museums are able to decide what information to include, and what artworks they will make available (and at what level of quality); some believe this is counter-intuitive to the website's seemingly democratic objective.
For example, in the White House virtual collection, one photo of a former First Lady does not include a key piece of information to understand the context of the image. Grace Coolidge often wore brightly colored clothes. In her White House portrait, she was dressed in a red sleeveless flapper dress and stood next to a large white dog. There are two versions of this picture: one showing Coolidge on a white background with softer lines, and one showing her on the White House lawn. The Google Arts & Culture description leaves out the reason for why there are two images. President Coolidge preferred his wife to wear a white dress. The artist, however, wanted the dress to contrast with the white dog. President Coolidge then retorted, "Dye the dog!"
While perhaps not crucial to understanding the exhibit, this and other examples show that Google Arts & Culture and partner museums are in a position of power to curate the content and educational information of the virtual exhibition.
* Audience: Some critics have expressed concern over the intended audience of the platform, as this should shape the type of content available through the platform. For example, Director of the Center for the Future of Museums, Elizabeth Merritt, described the project as an "interesting experiment" but was skeptical as to its intended audience.
* Possible security risks: Some critics have raised the question of how Arts & Culture visitors might maliciously use the Street View images. For example, using highly detailed images of galleries, people could use this platform to map out museum security systems, and then be able to circumvent these protective measures during a break-in.
Timeline of introductions
All of these museums have an adapted version of Google Street View designed to photograph building interiors.
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
Similar initiatives
![Wiki-loves-art-nouveau-europeana-banner](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Wiki-loves-art-nouveau-europeana-banner.gif)
Many museums and arts organizations have created their own online data and
virtual exhibitions. Some offer virtual 3-D tours similar to the Google Arts & Culture's gallery view, whereas others simply reproduce images from their collection on the institution's web page. Some museums have collections that exist solely in cyberspace and are known as
virtual museum
A virtual museum is a digital entity that draws on the characteristics of a museum, in order to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalization, interactivity, and richness of content. Virtual museums can perform as t ...
s.
*
Bucharest Natural History Museum and the
Museum of the Romanian Peasant
The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant ( ro, Muzeul Național al Țăranului Român) is a museum in Bucharest, Romania, with a collection of textiles (especially costumes), icons, ceramics, and other artifacts of Romanian peasant life. One ...
offer virtual tours of two of Romania's larger historical/anthropological museums.
*
Europeana
Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought togethe ...
is a virtual repository of artworks, literature, cultural objects, relics, and musical recordings/writings from over 2000 European institutions.
*
Public Catalogue Foundation
Art UK is a cultural, education charity in the United Kingdom, previously known as the Public Catalogue Foundation. Since 2003, it has digitised more than 220,000 paintings by more than 40,000 artists and is now expanding the digital collection t ...
has digitized all the circa 210,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom, and made the paintings viewable by the public through a series of affordable catalogues and, in partnership with the BBC, the "Your Paintings" website.
Works by some 40,000 painters are included.
* Khan Academy's
smARThistory
Smarthistory is a free resource for the study of art history created by art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Smarthistory is an independent not-for-profit organization and the official partner to Khan Academy for art history.
Smarthisto ...
is a multimedia resource with videos, audio guides, mobile applications and commentary from art historians.
*
The Prado launched a virtual collection, in collaboration with Google Earth, in January 2009. The website contained photos of 14 Prado paintings, each with up to 14 gigapixels.
* The
Virtual Museum of Canada
The Digital Museums Canada (DMC; , ''MNC'') is a funding program in Canada "dedicated to online projects by the museum and heritage community," helping organizations to build digital capacity.
Administered by the Canadian Museum of History (CMH) ...
is a virtual collection containing exhibits from thousand of Canadian local, provincial and national museums.
*
Wikipedia GLAM ("galleries, libraries, archives, and museums", also including botanic and zoological gardens) helps cultural institutions share their resources with the world through collaborative projects with experienced Wikipedia editors.
Footnotes
Sources
"Google Art: See Paintings like never before" ''BananaBandy'', 6 June 2016. Retrieved on 6 June 2016.
*
*
*
*
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Google Arts and Culture
Art websites
Art Project
Internet properties established in 2011
Articles containing video clips