Exhibit of the week: The Google Art Project

(Online at googleartproject.com)

Sometimes it’s appropriate to question whether beholding a famous work of art in person truly is an irreplaceable experience, said Tim Adams in the London Guardian. The unveiling of the Google Art Project earlier this month raised the possibility that online encounters with painting’s greatest masterpieces soon will become a legitimate substitute for “the real thing.” Google has, after all, created an art site capable of generating “genuine wonder.” In the project’s first phase, 17 great museums in Europe and the U.S.—from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to New York’s Frick Collection—have opened their doors to Google’s cameras, letting the search engine create interactive, visitor’s-eye tours of their galleries. While not every painting in the museums’ collections has been reproduced in detail, those that have been—wow. Google’s high-resolution images allow you to view Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night or Pieter Brueghel’s The Harvesters “in finer detail than if you were standing in front of them.”

The navel of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus truly does merit closer attention, said Tom Sutcliffe in the London Independent. “Not quite an ‘outie,’ it still presents a little protuberant bump,” and I bet you’d never even considered studying it before Google gave us a “7-billion-pixel digitized image” to zoom in on. Try getting that intimate with the canvas at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery and “a guard would probably dash forward and tackle you” before you could even tell him about the faint outline of an underdrawing you detected just to the right of the finished belly button.

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“Call me a curmudgeon,” but seeing a painting firsthand is still so much better, said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. “To start with, human vision is binocular,” allowing it to “grasp the thickness, weight, and texture” of a van Gogh brushstroke in a way it can’t with a two-dimensional image. Further, our eyes are sensitive “to atmosphere, to space—in short, to what people like to call ‘aura.’” That matters, because art is “more concerned with what cannot be known” than what can be illuminated in a pixelated screen. But the screen does offer a meaningful way to deepen our appreciation of the real thing, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Google is giving us a unique chance to study paintings closely “as made things,” which is “great practice for looking at actual works.” Photographic reproductions have been “the next best thing to being there” for generations. Now, the next best thing has become a “mesmerizing, world-expanding” experience.