Google and Art
What did we do before the Internet? I’m not being facetious; sometimes it’s hard to remember what life was like before we could find three disparate ingredients left in our kitchens, enter them into a search engine and come up with a dozen possible recipes.
Every day there are new wonders to be discovered. I have a good friend — a wonderful teacher who has been teaching for more than 35 years — who said to me the other day: “I can’t remember how I planned a lesson or taught in the classroom before the Internet.” The concept of a “teachable moment” takes on a whole new meaning when a child asks a question in the classroom and the teacher can say “Let’s look it up right now.” And teachers who have Internet capabilities in their classrooms can use moments like that to help students vet the websites that turn up in the search engines, helping their students understand what makes a credible and reliable Internet source. With the sheer volume of information available on the web, this may be one of the most important skills a student can learn.
Before you knock the virtual world, I’d like to tell you one of my favorite real world stories, which comes from a friend of my parents. When he was a boy, this friend went to Catholic school. By his account, the school relied mostly on worn, out-of-date texts. One year, the art class was gifted with brand new art books, complete with beautiful, full color plates of some of the world’s greatest masterpieces. The nun who taught the class handed out the books and said: “Now class, turn to page 29. Rip it out. Now turn to page 47 and rip it out.” Each of the pages in question exhibited a masterpiece of world art that had the unfortunate distinction of featuring a nude human body. Each nude was permanently removed from the books, apparently so as not to scar impressionable young minds. When I first heard this story, it cracked me up. Years later, I understood what a travesty it was, and how those children had been robbed.
Fast forward to today, when I was stunned and thrilled to discover the Google Art Project. Google has taken its street view technology and “mapped” the collections of 17 of the world’s greatest art museums. Individual works of art have been digitized with an average of seven billion pictures per image, allowing viewers to zoom in and see the minutest details, individual brush strokes and even tiny cracks in the canvas. I have had the privilege of visiting five of these museums. I remember being overjoyed and overwhelmed at the same time. There was always too much to see and too little time to see it.
This remarkable new tool will bring the art world up close and personal to people who would never be able to visit the Uffizi in Florence or the National Gallery in London. With the Google Art Project, you can roam the halls of these great art houses for as long as you want without fear of blisters. You can spend minutes or hours or days studying a particular work of art in detail. You can compare the work of a Renaissance master whose paintings are housed in more than one of these museums. You can do it all from the comfort of your home with no additional travel expenses. The number of museums represented, as well as the art works available for high resolution viewing is still a drop in the bucket when it comes to all the great work in the world, but it sure is a great start.
So maybe the next time we have a snow day, you should take your kids on a virtual museum visit. But fair warning: none of the nudes have been ripped out (I checked).
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