Google Art Project, piloted by a few museums more than a year ago, has now (like its parent company) conquered the world. Some 151 institutions in 40 countries (including 29 in the U.S.) have now jumped on bandwidth bandwagon, and every one of them (well, not quite) has felt impelled to send me an e-mail announcing its participation. As I write this, the announcements are still coming in. (I’ve yet to hear from South Africa.)
Even the White House has gotten into the act. It had the distinction of being the first participant to inform me of its Google-fication. Last night I received an alert from the Office of the First Lady, embargoed until 12:01 a.m.:
The White House today announced the latest step in President and Mrs. Obama‘s efforts to truly make 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue “The People’s House,” by working with Google Art Project to create a virtual 360-degree tour [my link, not theirs] of the White House’s public rooms. Since the President’s inauguration—when he and Mrs. Obama surprised guests attending public tours—the Obamas have worked to make the White House more open and accessible.
I had viewed but never reviewed Google Art Project in its first incarnation. I decided I had better things to write about, basically agreeing with Sebastian Smee‘s contrarian assessment, published on Feb. 10, 2011 in the Boston Globe. I believed the pilot was so lame that museums would see its shortcomings and work to develop more art-friendly and viewer-friendly interfaces of their own.
Here’s what Smee had said:
Call me [and call me] a curmudgeon, but I remain underwhelmed. It’s not just that
Google’s interface is frustrating, or that the choice of viewing
possibilities is constrained and seemingly arbitrary. It also strikes me
as a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Technology is
getting confused with art in ways that do little to advance the cause
of either.
In my own very trying trial, I often found myself unable to extricate myself from a dead end, or I got stuck gazing at the museum’s floor, instead of its art. Here’s one bizarre screenshot from the Metropolitan Museum’s Google Art site:
Having been to the real State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, I was eager to digitally revisit it. Talk about “frustrating interface”! Navigation was balky, and when I wanted to examine a painting’s label, the best I could do was this:
I decided to return to the scene of the screen to see if Google’s navigation had improved. It hadn’t.
I managed to stumble upon Rembrandt‘s “Flora” as I lurched around. Try as I might to get a straight look at it, I could only see it at an angle. I couldn’t read its label when I magnified it and there was no information for the uninitiated about who the artist was. Its title appeared to be “David and Jonathan” (the very light text in the middle of the painting). Its true title could be discerned, with difficulty, in the lower right corner of this screen:
After mousing around this cybermuseum for a few irritating minutes, I wanted to navigate to the site’s high-definition images of 22 works from the Hermitage. But when I clicked on the “Artworks” link above the Hermitage gallery tour, I was yanked from that museum to a screen with individual works from all the museum/participants.
To get to the Hermitage images, I had to click on “Collections,” then on “S,” then on “State Hermitage Museum” in an alphabetical list of institutions (do not search under “H”). After that, I had to roll over the museum’s name, roll over two icons on the lower right of a box that emerged, and finally click on the icon for “artwork view.” There, I finally met up with “Flora.” If that sounds complicated, I’ve just made it easier for you by explaining how to do it.
At least I could now see “Flora” straight, instead of cockeyed:
The chief value of this exasperating exercise is that it makes you realize just how enjoyable and soul-satisfying it is to wander through a museum the old-fashioned way.