A reader writes:
In response to your query as to whether museums can do a similar project, they already are! Check out the Google Art Project. So far it has virtual versions of 17 major world museums, including the Tate Britain, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersberg, the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Palace of Versailles, and the Met, MOMA, and Frick in New York. You can tour the galleries using the same technology as Google Street View, and then there are pages for all the art with very high quality images and tons of information.
Another writes:
Here is a link to MOMA. I love to look at the Van Gogh Museum. The paint is so thick and the colors so rich, one can almost analyze stroke by stroke.
Blake Gopnik critiqued the project when it launched on February 1:
That’s one of the strange things about Google’s Art Project: It allows us, maybe even encourages us, to look at art as it was never meant to be seen. Van Gogh liked his heavy brushwork, but couldn’t have imagined it becoming fetishized online. In Giovanni Bellini’s 1480 Saint Francis in the Desert, the gigapixeled painting from the Frick Collection in New York, you can see such tiny details in the landscape background that you risk losing sight of the holy man the picture’s about. The techno-fun of zooming and panning and scrolling may distract from the sacred, subtle contemplative pleasures at the heart of the painting.
Thanks to Google and its Art Project, we may look closer than ever before, but it’s not at all clear that we’ll be looking better. At its best, the one-on-one, hours-long, in-the-flesh encounter with a work of art in a museum can be thought of as an antidote to the disembodied, Google-powered rush of laptop-life. The Art Project risks collapsing the two experiences.
(Image: Screenshot of "Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat" by Paul Cézanne)
The Dish 