BE CULTURED FROM THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME >>>>
Have you seen the new Google Art Project? Wow! What an amazing way to kill a few minutes - or a few hours!
It's like the Google street views only instead of pictures of cities and streets it offers tours inside many of the world's great art museums. Seventeen museums to be exact. According to a fine article by Roberta Smith in the New York Times, many of the world's great museums are holding off on allowing Google to document their collections. The Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., are among those not yet included. And some, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, have given them only limited access. MOMA has granted Google access to only one of their many galleries and detailed pictures of only 17 of the paintings in their collection.
Navigating through the site can be frustrating. I often found myself kicked into other museums when all I wanted to do was zoom in on a different section of a painting, and trying to navigate through the hallways and galleries can be dizzying and confusing. But if you quit trying to find specific things and just let the site surprise you, it's amazing what you can find. I've never seen such detailed photographs of paintings, and I venture to guess that most visitors to actual (as opposed to online) museums never take such close looks at paintings as they are given on this site.
When you go to the home page it opens on a background image of a tiny section of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" seen in such extreme close-up that the brush strokes in the sky look like mountains and ocean waves, and you can see the weave of the canvas.
I took a look at "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli at the Uffizi in Florence, and the details were so sharp that I noticed for the first time that Venus has dirty fingernails. And you can see where the paint has crackled.
Some of the close-up views are actually larger than life; you see more than you can see in person in the museums. That's not real, it's surreal.
There are plenty of flaws, many of which I'm sure they'll fix, but the flaws are miniscule compared with the thrill in seeing great art in this way. The biggest problem is that once you get started you may never be able to pull yourself away.