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In the latest move in Google's endeavour to spellbind the world into submission, the Internet search giant yesterday upped the dues in its art offerings. Specifically, information technology debuted a spiffy new version of Google Arts & Civilisation, a website and app that promises to requite y'all access to the world's museums at a click.

The official Google blog teased the relaunch like this (links are their ain from the original):

Just as the world's precious artworks and monuments need a touch-up to await their all-time, the home we've built to host the world's cultural treasures online needs a lick of pigment every now and and then. We're gear up to pull off the dust sheets and innovate the new Google Arts & Culture website and app, by the Google Cultural Institute. The app lets you explore annihilation from cats in art since 200 BCE to the colour red in Abstruse Expressionism, and everything in between.

The sprawling new initiative is the latest extension of the Google Fine art Project, which got quite a bit of buzz dorsum in 2011 when it brought virtual versions of 17 museums, plus zoomable high-res versions of a few superstar paintings, into the easy attain of web browsers everywhere. The Google Arts & Culture site kickoff launched this past year with less fanfare.

Google Arts & Culture at present boasts "more than a chiliad museums across 70 countries," from big partners similar the British Museum (with close to 9,000 works) and LA'due south Getty (a hefty 16,881 items), to the National Museum of Mongolia, in Ulaanbataar (with a small-scale 96 items to view) or the outdoor "Sculpture by the Bounding main" exhibit in Cottesloe, Australia (with 69 of its advertised 70 exhibits on view).

The whole thing is pretty fun to play around with, if still a scrap clunky. It packs almost too many features together with the seeming thousand ambition of becoming the one-stop web portal for art aficionados, and feels a bit like a palatial new trophy museum that you slowly realize was built past robots who aren't totally sure what anything really means. One infinitesimal you are staring in awe at some absurd virtual allure, the next yous wander into another digital expressionless finish.

At its most bones and useful, though, information technology is an fine art search engine. You lot can parse the world's art—or at to the lowest degree the world's art that Google could get its easily on, which is substantial, but far from comprehensive—via keyword, quickly scanning the annal for, as an instance, all the works featuring a "kiss" (which could be the iconic Rodin sculpture or a photo of the band). You tin can also look for specific "Artists" or "Fine art Movements."

Detail of a Google Arts & Civilisation Search for "kiss."

Interested in images related to the "War on Terror?" Well, that's ane of the categories discoverable via the "Historical Events" search. Be warned, though—for some dubious reason this gallery features a random mix of Time magazine covers and ancient artifacts from Northern Transitional islamic state of afghanistan from the LACMA collection.

You can as well search by "Medium," allowing yous to see Google Arts & Civilisation has more than 36,000 "Engravings" on offering, but a mere 25 works in "Beeswax"—the exact same number, in fact, of items whose medium is listed as "Pare."

Searches are organized in tiled rows, and can be sorted in a number of ways: by the vague metric of "Popularity" (it's not clear what this means); by "Fourth dimension," which yields a nifty timeline view; and lastly by "Color," a feature destined to thrill interior decorators everywhere looking to pillage art history for inspiration.

Google Arts & Culture app, sorting Van Gogh's fine art for "light-green."

For the art student cramming for a examination, loads of didactic material is available. These range from a really absurd slideshow-cum-essay that walks you lot through the brilliant details of Pieter Breugel the Elder's Tower of Babel, to a rather inexplicable introduction to "Contemporary Fine art," which posits that the "tactile 'information' of craft media spoke of a direct connection to an endangered humanity," even as its timeline begins with a 1946 painting by British abstractionist Ben Nicholson. That'southward a pretty broad definition of "contemporary."

In that location are way, way, way more than features to cover. You can, for case, explore the interiors of hundreds of partner institutions in a museum-themed version of Google Street View. Then, if yous desire to, say, know what it's similar to wander into a slightly distorted virtual version of the gift store of the Egon Schiele Fine art Centrum in Český Krumlov, Czech republic, go nuts.

In its app incarnation, the new initiative likewise touts (or is an ad for, depending on your POV) integration with Google Paper-thin, the web giant's no-frills, easy-to-employ scheme for turning smartphone handsets into VR headsets via a cardboard visor. Google Arts & Culture thereby promises to enable you to "accept a virtual tour of the street art scene in Rome; step within a cosmos by famous street artist, Insa; or even travel 2,500 years dorsum in fourth dimension and wait effectually the ancient Greek temple of Zeus."

The Epitome Recognizer.

Finally, the least developed—but perhaps most ambitious—feature here is the snappily named Art Recognizer, available at just 3 partnered institutions: London's Dulwich Picture Gallery, Sydney'due south Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. In essence, Art Recognizer promises to let yous bespeak your phone at whatever pic in a museum, at which point it will recognize the work, and call up all the bachelor data and multimedia material related to it.

Non beingness in London, Sydney, or DC, I'thousand unable to say exactly how well Art Recognizer does its art recognizing. I did point it at onscreen versions of various works from these collections, and it seemed to do the trick.

In consequence, with its new initiative, Google promises to reinvent the museum wall label for the historic period of Pokémon Get. Interpret that sentence how y'all volition.

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Source: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/google-arts-culture-app-grand-ambitions-566183

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