The Google Art Projet, or why Google should use its power to help culture transcend physical limitations

Homepage of the Google Art Project

Last week one of the big stories in both traditional and social media was the launch of the Google Art Project, an ambitious project merging the Google Street view technology with “gigapixel” digital images of the works of art from seventeen of the world’s greatest museums, including the Hermitage in Saint-Petersburg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Although Google’s technology is highly advanced, its Art Project is essentially doing what has been done ever since the very first years of the Internet: trying to give people the ability to visit various museums virtually from the comfort of their homes. However, it’s interesting to note that many of these museums, including the Louvre and the Tate have stopped trying to offer virtual visits and have instead focus on digitizing as many pieces of art as possible and making them accessible through a search engine.

Virtual tour of the Uffizi Gallery

This brings me to my main argument: I just don’t understand why we are still trying to reproduce the feeling of visiting a museum in a virtual way. I believe this feeling will never be fully reproduced in the digital sphere because as much as I love seeing high resolution pictures or prints of my favorite works, I just don’t feel the same emotion as when I am seeing the work in person. There was much talk of images with up to 14 billion pixels in the Google Art Project (although currently there is only one per museum) and this feature surely could potentially alter the way we see art since anyone will have access to the infinite details of every element in a painting. Yet, you still cannot get the subtleties of the brushstroke or the way light reflects on the painting, and I’m not even talking about the indescribable feeling associated with seeing firsthand the work done hundreds of years ago by some of humanity’s greatest masters.

Zoom in a Van Gogh Painting

Therefore, if I cannot reproduce the feeling of seeing a painting in person, it is pointless to try and reproduce the feeling of visiting a museum. And this is why I don’t get the reason for using the street view technology to allow users to move within the museum to somehow give them a similar experiences to actually being there. I know that the intent is not to reproduce with complete fidelity the experience of being at the Tate, but rather to give people who may not have the chance to go to the London a glimpse of what they could see there.  But I think that instead of investing so much energy trying to imitate a feeling that cannot be reproduced, we should be using the specific advantages of digital technology and the Web, including the ability to transcend physical limitations.

Here I am in no way trying to undermine the work done by tremendous art curators whose knowledge far exceeds what I can ever wish to know about art, but I believe museums have one major flaw: they can only display pieces that are in their collection or temporary exhibition and are physically present at the museum. Moreover, the number of pieces of art that can displayed is also restricted by a museum’s physical gallery space.

Homepage of the CCA website

Having acted as Bluesponge’s account manager for the Canadian Center for Architecture, I know a thing or do about this issue. The CCA holds one of the world’s greatest archive of material related to architecture. However, only a fraction of this collection is displayed in its physical building in Montreal. The CCA website project was partly built on the belief that this invaluable collection belongs online, where it can be enjoyed by the public and accessible for researchers worldwide. Instead of trying to reproduce its physical space, and because increasing it is no small feat given how the current economic downturn has affected people’s ability and desire to donate money to cultural institutions, the CCA regards its website as a virtual extension of its physical building.

In this sense, wouldn’t be more interesting for humanity to gather all of the world’s biggest art collections, digitize them and commission art historians to organize virtual exhibitions where they would have the leisure of associating any piece of art around a theme and display them accordingly. Moreover, wouldn’t be great to be able to view all of Picasso’s work, arranged chronologically. And how about navigating geographically? I would love to see all of the paintings produced in Spain during the 1910s! And how about show me all of the work produced around the world in the year 1777. You see my point, the possibilities are endless, and this would actually have a profound impact on the way we interact with art.

Now I know I have simplified this issue to the degree where an art expert is probably looking for the comment section to tell me that I don’t know anything about the subject. Yes I know that digitizing all of the world’s art is probably not very realistic, although if someone can do it, it’s definitely the people at Google who are currently also taking on the other improbable task of digitizing the vast majority of books ever published by humanity. And yes, I know that choosing Picasso as an example basically demonstrates my lack of credibility on the subject. But the point is that I’m a 26 year-old geek/history buff/stats lover and if you get me to write such a long blog post about how excited I am about the prospect of comparing European painting during the Renaissance to the work done in China, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica at the same time, then isn’t this level of excitement from younger generations precisely what museums around the world are striving to achieve?