Google Art Project Brings Galleries To Your PC

Zothecula writes "Google has announced a collaboration with 17 of the world's most acclaimed art museums that lets people view over 1,000 high res-artwork images and 17 gigapixel images while taking a virtual stroll through their galleries using Street View technology. While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person, the Google Art Project could be the next best thing for those without the time and money to pop on a plane and trade elbows with crowds of tourists looking to catch a glimpse of what some of the best museums have on offer."

Time and money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only rich people can afford to get airplane tickets, book a hotel room for a few days oversea and skip work just to go see some paintings.

And don't give me crap about where I live. Half of the families in Canada earn less than 15$K per year, and that's with the 1 Canadian dollar = 1.01204 U.S. dollars
of today.

I Disagree

[BJ_Covert_Action]

While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person....

I disagree wholeheartedly here. If Google, or someone else, can, one day, download the world's most famous art projects directly into my visual, auditory, olfactory, and other sensory lobes in my brain, that would beat the hell out of traveling through the meatspace to see a piece of art in person. I know we're not there yet, but we're chugging forward baby steps at a time. So yeah, nostalgia and all that says that a visit to The Louvre is a life-changing experience, blah blah blah.

But frankly, I don't have the time or patience to deal with the hordes of gawking art patrons at a museum. So yeah, Google, keep up the work (along with everyone else bringing information to the masses). One day, when I can press a button on my phone, and have my brain light up like it just saw Mona Lisa in person, then I certainly will proclaim that such an experience beats the hell out of actually seeing that painting in person.

Cool, but not the same as being there...

[spiedrazer]

Having seen several works by the major impressionists in person, I can say that no 2D rendering of a truly great painting can do it justice, no matter how high the resolution. Looking at a Van Gogh, for example, the paint depth in the brush strokes can be up to a centimeter thick, and this depth interactes with the light in person in a way that you can't capture in a 2D image. Which is not to say the whole thing isn't still really cool.

Sometimes not even that

[Moraelin]

Sometimes not even that. I wish I could say that all those sculptures and paintings of naked women were purely for aesthetic appreciation of the human body, but that really wasn't the case. Outside of church frescoes, most paintings fall into one of the categories of immortalizing oneself (portraits) or essentially softcore porn. All that was different is essentially the social contract that it's ok to look at naked women if you pretend it's a representation of Venus [wikipedia.org] ;)

The age of masturbating another part of your body, as you aptly put it, only came much later and is largely a recent phenomenon.

Kinda puts it in perspective, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if, assuming one could get cryogenically frozen until the year 3000 like in Futurama, in a future museum one would hear the guide going, "And to the left we have Larry Flint's unnamed recently-discovered masterpiece, which we tentatively call 'Venus with still life up the ass'" ;)