I can hardly express how excited I am about Google Arts & Culture, especially in these stay-at-home times. And no, this is not a paid advertisment! I really am just that impressed. It’s just got so many advantages, it blows my mind. For us Museum Lovers, it is a treasure trove.
What is Google A&C? It’s a website that contains collections of all sorts of amazing cultural material. For example:
- You can explore the “Historical Figures” category, in which clicking on a person of your choice opens a photo and short introductory essay, as well as a picture gallery of related material.
- You can visit incredible culture heritage sites around the world in Street View mode! Check out Petra, where you can stand right in front of the famous Treasury that starred in Indiana Jones! The Taj Mahal is another beautiful Street View site.
And, most relevant for Museum Lovers’ purposes, it’s got an astounding array of museums that you can virtually visit. These virtual visits are so beautifully crafted, I don’t know anything even close to this good anywhere else online. Individual museums just don’t have the resources to achieve the sort of wide-ranging and perfectly integrated experience that Google A&C offers. What do I mean? well…
- The number of museums you can visit online is big, and getting bigger. Currently there are 46 world-class museums on the roster. Even one of these can occupy you for hours on end; visiting all 46 online would take months!
- The format seamlessly integrates Street View mode inside the museum (this totally blows me away) with luscious, high-resolution photos of individual artworks. It is SO COOL to be reading about an object and looking at the photo of it, and then to click on the “View in Street View” button to see how it’s displayed in the museum. While this isn’t available for every object, it is an AWESOME feature; it’s what I would call as close as you can get to a real museum visit!
- Did I mention the luscious photos? They are breathtaking. The quality is phenomenal – you can zoom in for days! Take this miniature painting in New Delhi: you can count Krishna’s eyelashes! I suspect that Google A&C took their own photos of the objects in many cases, because this is a quality that most museums just don’t have lying around their image archives (with some notable exceptions like the Met – hello, pinhead-size gold granulation!).
- Each highlighted object – not all the objects in the museum, nor all the ones you can see in Street View, but a selection of highlights – is accompanied by an excellent short essay about it. In the Strong National Museum of Play, for instance, a James Bond video game for Commodore 64 is explained within its historical context (who knew??). The information presented in these essays is, as far as I can judge in my areas of expertise, not only correct (short of a few typos I’ve seen), but accessibly written. I wonder who writes these; is there a staff of trained cultural historians back at A&C HQ writing these things?
This is all to say, Google A&C offers an unparalled online cultural experience. I even used its excellent presentation of the Altes Museum in Berlin in a question on a take-home exam for my university students. (“Select two of the statues exhibited in the Altes Museum’s rotunda, shown in the digital exhibition by Google Arts & Culture. Discuss how the statue portrays the god or goddess in connection to what you know about the divinity’s realm of influence, powers, and attributes…) While there are some other great online initiatives from museums now – ramping up in the current flatten-the-curve era – Google A&C is my favorite for the above reasons. A selection of some of my other faves will appear in the next blog post.
Take a gander yourself, and have a ball!