After almost every other art website in the world has covered this, it is time for PAINTED,ETC. to have a little look at the Google Art Project.
Launched at the Tate Britain on February 1st, 2011, it’s essentially Google Streetview that went inside public walls - 17 of the worlds largest art museums. It won’t be surprising if a street art equivalent is initiated from all the already existing images taken by Google Street View cameras, however there is one defining difference between the street view and the museum view. High resolution. You can zoom right in on some paintings (a place where museum guards would never willingly let you put your head) to the point that you can see how they’re cracking, peeling, and almost flaking onto the museum floor. Thank god for the conservators these super high resolution macro images seem to suggest. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be funny, but peering at these lofty and decaying physical objects through Google’s gigapixel digital lenses is like some kind of grand opera rendered in midi or mp3. It’s bizarre, faulty and flawed - perfectly encompassing our disposition today. Looking at paintings like this might be the equivalent of watching David Lynch films on your iphone. Antiquated value judgements aside - it’s undeniably what we are doing.
As Nancy Proctor from Curator Journal notes:
“What I’m most intrigued by is the way that the gigapixel images underscore the importance and centrality of the original object. Yes, you can find some high resolution images of many of these artworks online already, but if not taken by the museum, they have been scanned from catalogues and other print reproductions. As such they are inherently limited: ultimately you will zoom in to paper textures or simply stop. Without access to the painting, the level of detail presented in the Google Art Project can’t be achieved. By the same token, photographing at this quality is no small or cheap effort and certainly not something that can be achieved for large percentages of our collections in the near term. This is food for thought as museums think about their evolving business models and relationships with partners like Google and others.”
Is Google preparing to digitize our recent cultural histories in case of the 2012 apocalypse? Do they have a policy to shoot a server farm into orbit if earth goes down? If so the current iteration of Google Art Project gives a very contemporary view of the current world - it’s full of old masters, is decidedly Euro-centric and ends in about 1837. This of course will give future historians a very accurate picture of what life was like when the cosmic shit hit the fan. Joking.
It seems that almost every other independent online review of this project commends it briefly before pointing out it’s massively enormous gaping holes. Where is contemporary art, where is internet and media art that could exist natively in this environment, where are the works that have been blurred out due to copyright restrictions. To many online art types it has been taken as a kind of denial of their existence. As one commentator notes, necessary additions by artists from today will probably be added first by hackers adding graffiti to the project. But it’s purely an issue of scale. How in the fuck would Google go about getting copyright clearance on reproductions from all these artists if the project were to go right up to the present, immediately? Clearly, to get the project off the ground, they’ve started with works that are now largely free of copyright, vastly lowering the administrative nightmare the project would have required had it been composed of anything current. Google is a very large company, but they’re not that big. Or rather, they don’t care about art that much. If they could launch an entire and all encompassing multi-tiered-art-present-encyclopedic-wiki-tome of knowledge and images that was omnipresent in one go, it would be damn scary. This is a project, it has stages. It may be where they’re headed, but this is the start. Prepare yourself.
Or if you really can’t wait to get to your present on, open up photoshop and superimpose yourself in there. The project is begging for it. Otherwise, enjoy another big online step into a combined world of paintings and images - google does PAINTED, ETC. writ large.
posted by Ry David Bradley
