The Google Art Project

A New Generation of Museums on the Web? (revised)

by Nancy Proctor

This article responds to comments made at the Google Art Project launch, February 1, 2011 at Tate Britain, and on the CuratorJournal.org blog post that preceded this article. All quotes used here are from these sources. The author would like to thank members of Curator’s online community for their collaboration in analyzing the impact of Google Art, and for sharing their insights so generously.

Google Art launch at Tate Britain, 1 February 2011

On February 1 of this year, Google launched its much-heralded Art Project in partnership with 17 museums from Europe and the U.S. Despite the limited content and a long wish-list of enhancements, the Google Art Project offers a glimpse of innovative new ways for museums to use and be used on the Web, collaboratively.

Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Museums in London, pointed out at the project’s launch that the first generation of museums on the Web was concerned with quantity of information and getting as many objects on line as possible. Now a second generation is emerging, and it’s focusing on depth and quality of content. Eric Johnson, webmaster at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, describes this transition as a shift from “content” to “context.”

The Google Art Project offers new contexts for encountering art. In particular, the gigapixel scans by which artworks are rendered into digital data streams are enabling intimate encounters with images at visual depths not possible even in the galleries. Julian Raby, director of the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries, points out that the ability to engage with artworks in intimate close-ups at a computer screen is transforming online art viewing from “informational” to “emotive.” Beth Harris, director of Digital Learning at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, adds that “the Google Art Project encourages close looking perhaps more than being in the galleries often does—and close looking is one of the goals of museum educators everywhere.” “You can take as much time as you like, any time and place you choose,” adds Robin White Owen, principal at MediaCombo—allowing you to avoid the crowds, physical fatigue, and self-consciousness that Beth Harris sees museum visitors struggle with.

Detail of Rembrandt's Night Watch from the gigapixel Google Art image

High-resolution images and high-definition video are a good example of how the Web and digital media can be used to complement, rather than imitate, the encounter with the artwork in the gallery. Nelson Mattos, vice-president of Engineering at Google, celebrates the access that the Internet provides for those who cannot physically travel to distant museums. The Google Art Project promises to enrich that online art experience both informationally and emotionally.

Photography at this level of quality is neither easy nor cheap. Museums are unlikely to digitize large percentages of their collections in this way in the near term. Beyond the costs of the gigapixel capture process, negotiating the rights to represent art online can be exceptionally difficult and costly. Jane Burton, creative director of Tate Media, observes that Google Art risks giving a very skewed image of creative output through time and around the world. At minimum, she says, “a large tranche of twentieth-century modernism will be absent” because of high reproduction fees or other obstacles. Even as it opens up access to important collections, the Internet can limit remote audiences’ understanding of old masters and the work of generous contemporary artists, who, like Chris Ofili, are willing to give permission for their work to be scanned and displayed online, free or at an affordable rate.

Long term, who will fund the second generation of museums on the Web? Especially when, as Eric Johnson points out, we have hardly “finished” the “first generation” of basic scanning and digitization efforts for the Web. We can’t afford to be distracted by the “next big thing” to the extent that “our second generation will be focusing on a smaller pool of material and as such we’ll always be handicapped when it comes to truly analyzing our complete cultural heritage.”

The Art Project also includes “Street Views” of the museums that cooperated with Google. Creating these interior scenes involved sorting out complex copyright issues. In progressing through the galleries, Google’s cameras had to avoid capturing works with copyright restrictions, or were obliged to blur them out in the final product. Luc Vincent is director of engineering at Google and head of the team that did the Street View captures in the museums. At the launch event, he talked about the technical challenges and described plans to upgrade the panorama cameras—particularly in terms of aperture control—to achieve a more consistent quality throughout the interior spaces of future iterations. Collaborating with museums’ lighting and photography teams will also be critical to getting the best possible results.

Probably the most frequently asked question about the Google Art Project is: “Why wasn’t [fill in the blank] museum included?” The project’s restricted numbers of both museums and paintings has drawn some reviewers’ criticism. In addition to copyright impediments, working with museums is notoriously slow and difficult. Getting 17 of the world’s biggest museums on board with the same project is an incredible achievement, especially given the legal and staff-time costs involved. If people want to see more museums and art in this way, it’s a sign of the project’s value and potential. Perhaps both online facilitators like Google and museums will heed the popular call, and be in a position to fund the response.

So we must question—as did Michael Edson, head of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution—“Is Google in this for the long haul?” Sheila Brennan, associate director of public projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, believes that—given the complexities of working with museums—“It really did take an outside company like Google to produce such a project as they are doing with Google Books. And they will be able to sustain and continue to broaden the scope, which is very exciting.” But will Google continue to invest here?

Google Art demo at Tate Britain, 1 February 2011

My sense is that regardless of whether Google adds more museums and artworks to the Art Project, the concept has been proven. We’ll see more panoramas of museum interiors and more high resolution images of artworks online henceforth. Watch the technophobes zoom into a gigapixel painting for the first time, and see the scales fall from their eyes when they realize they can’t get this close to the art even in the gallery. I predict that the scholarly and experiential power of this kind of online presentation will prove irresistible to museums in their next generation on the Web.

In large part, this workability is due to the clean, non-intrusive interface design by Schematic. James Davis, head of online collections at the Tate Museums, observed: “Online the interface in effect plays a similar role to the frame, the glass, the label, the map, the wall and so on in the gallery. These can either support or distract from an artwork, and many of our existing collection websites do not support the display of artwork very well because we only consider these digital reproductions as mere references to the real thing.”

Hugh Wallace agrees that the Google Art Project functionality isn’t new, yet “the integrated features in combination with an attractive and straightforward user interface gives [sic] the sort of polished experience I feel is often lacking in [the museum] sector.” Part of that sense of polish is probably familiarity, because there is no doubt that the Street Views of the museums interiors per se are the least successful aspect of the Google Art Project, and so far are not adequate for capturing sculpture and objects in the round. Not only is this yet another limitation to the canon of art that is represented by Google’s site, but also a source of frustration to online visitors. “And the floor plan navigation doesn’t help much,” adds Josh Robinson, a multimedia content manager and designer living in New York. “Room 15” doesn’t mean anything to me on mouse-over, for example.” Now that a prototype is live, I hope that Google and its museum partners will engage in active research into user needs in order to inform the enhancements of a second generation or future similar online initiatives.

Detail of Bruegel's The Harvesters from the gigapixel Google Art

Once the technical quality is perfected, Edson asks, “Can the pace of re-scanning galleries keep up with the pace of gallery re-installations? Should it?” From my own observations of visitor response to QTVR “virtual tours” of temporary exhibitions made for the U.K.’s first online gallery, New Art, and TheGalleryChannel.com (now defunct), I would argue that there is huge value in digital records of gallery displays, even if they are not perfectly up-to-date with the “real world” installations. Curators make deliberate and educated choices about the placement of art in the museum. The stories and relationships revealed by the way objects are hung in the galleries offer as much insight into the works as any catalogue or other document authored by an expert. Scholars and amateurs alike are thrilled by the opportunity to see a show online that they couldn’t visit in person. Again, we should not be pitting the digital against the analog as if they were mutually exclusive, but rather asking how we can create network effects and new forms of engagement by creating rich eco-systems of complementary platforms and experiences that reach more and broader audiences.

We will almost certainly develop new applications—even ones the inventors didn’t anticipate—based on these new tools. For example, image recognition based on panoramic photos of interiors may provide the answer to the potential for creating location-based services in the gallery. Lost in the Louvre? Stop, look around with your phone’s camera, and it can match what the viewfinder sees against an online database of panoramic shots, enabling your phone to display your current location on a digital handheld map. “Google Goggles” and other visual recognition platforms such as Omniar have already shown promise in early museum tests. And if the interior Street Views can yield museum floor plans in the well-known Google Maps style, our visitors would be able to enjoy a consistency of interface and quality from museum maps that is not possible today. Johns Hopkins University museum studies student Laurie Stepp proposes that “in a world with too many different things to try,” the Google Art Project “sets some standards for resolution, form, etc.” Perhaps as much as innovation, museums need standard interfaces to help our visitors find and orient themselves more easily with new content in new environments—be they online or in the “real world.”

Perhaps the most important role of the Google Art Project is to be a “platform,” as Michael Edson puts it, giving rise to new and surprising ways of interacting with collections. Other than making a “gallery” in Flickr, there aren’t really simple (or entirely legal) ways to create and manage a personal selection of artworks from all of these museums online. (Beth Harris points out that ArtsConnectEd was an early pioneer in this sort of cross-institutional digital service, enabling the collection of artworks from two Minneapolis institutions, the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.)

The “Create a Collection” feature proved so popular that Google had to add servers to support it immediately after launch. Museums should be inspired by this success to collaborate more on the Web: to exchange not just links but content in order to leverage and enrich online audiences and experiences. If I’m interested in Van Gogh, chances are I’m interested in all of his work—or at least more than what I can find in any single collection. The connectedness of the Web makes it increasingly difficult for museums to justify limiting the educational scope of their online presentations to what can be discovered within their own institution’s walls. Could the Google Art Project give rise, directly or indirectly, to a technology solution that makes content “phone home?” This would enable museums to track traffic to their assets accurately, wherever their content is used online. Web metrics could then continue to record the impact of educational and sponsorship-funded initiatives and encourage museums to tap into audiences beyond the walled gardens of their own websites.

Sheila Brennan asks if the impulse to collect can be enabled by enhanced searchability in future versions of the Google Art Project: “not just ‘find more works by this artist’ as is currently supported, but a way to ‘search across museums or browse/search works by tags [within] or across institutions.’” This would help people discover which museums actually hold paintings by selected artists, and which collection a given painting is in. More thematic metadata, or even support for user-generated tags, would offer new ways into the art. Brennan also wonders “if Google has any intention of adding a search filter just for ‘Art’ like it has now for ‘Books’?” This feature in Google’s main search interface would “make the Art Project a go-to place for exploring art because everything available would be so easy to find.”

Could the Google Art Project even make the museum irrelevant as a place to see art? On the contrary, Nicholas Serota said. He pointed out that every communications technology introduced so far—printing, photography, television, the Internet— has failed to stem the rising tide of visitors to museums. Erin Coburn, director of Digital Media at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, notes that throughout the history of museums, exactly this fear has been levied against every transformative new technology that has ultimately enabled museums to better achieve their missions. I would argue that both the gigapixel image and the Street View underscore and enhance the importance and centrality of the original object and its context in the museum. Without access to the painting, the exquisite level of detail presented in the Google Art Project can’t be achieved. Indeed, many online “bootleg” images reveal, at the deepest zoom level, only the texture of the printed catalogue page they were scanned from. Without the walls and real-world spaces that art lives within, curators cannot create the conversations and truthfully tell the stories that only emerge when works are placed in physical proximity.

I predict that Street Views of gallery installations will only fuel the desire to visit in person and increase the power of the museum pilgrimage to unleash the poetry of the encounter with the artwork. In the second generation of museums on the Web, we need to move beyond false binaries and futile contests between “the real thing” and its online representation. Instead we must learn to expertly use every tool at our disposal to make museums and their collections more accessible and relevant to audiences wherever they may be.

Nancy Proctor is Digital Editor of Curator: The Museum Journal and as a member of Smithsonian staff also collaborated with Google on the Institution’s participation in the Art Project.

Tagged as: Allegra Burnette, Amit Sood, ArtsConnectEd, Beth Harris, Center for History and New Media, Charlotte Sexton, CHNM, Chris Ofili, collecting, Eric Johnson, Erin Coburn, Flickr, Freer Sackler, George Mason University, gigapixel, Google Art, Google books, high resolution, interface design, James Davis, Jane Burton, Johns Hopkins University, Josh Robinson, Julian Raby, Laurie Stepp, London, Luc Vincent, MediaCombo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Michael Edson, Minneapolis Museum of Art, MoMA, Monticello, museum studies, Nancy Proctor, National Gallery, Nelson Mattos, Nicholas Serota, panoramic photography, QTVR, Robin White Owen, Schematic, Sheila Brennan, Smithsonian, Street View, Tate, Tate Britain, UX, Van Gogh, Versailles, Walker Art Center, Web