Means my daughter, who is visually impaired yet is entering college as a visual arts student, can zoom in on these with her tablet and appreciate those details that a regularly-sighted person takes for granted.
Thanks for this, I am going to point her to this collection.
Yeah, it means access for a lot of people who would otherwise, for many reasons, not have any access at all. Access, also, to many items that are not ordinarily on public display. It is true that seeing an art object as a physical object can enhance your understanding of it in a way that a photo of it doesn't, and I don't think that archives like this will replace that experience. But many can still benefit from it.
They only made the public domain images downloadable + zoomable, about 204,000 (not sure where you got the 50k figure). Stuff from 1900+ is often still under copyright, so that's why most of them are low-res.
Of the 204k, I filtered out baseball cards and cigarette packages, leaving 193,525. Of these, 151,782 are what I considered high quality: 1800+ pixels width and/or height.
Just go through the install steps in the README and run the above. It may take a smidge of hacking to get it working, this hasn't been polished for public consumption.
Ah, HN, where's there's always a comment that roughly reads "It's good, but [X] is better."
Snark aside, I wasn't aware of either of these before today, and I'm delighted that I now have hours and hours exploring them ahead of me. So thank you for the link to Google's project.
Oddly, despite the greater range of HQ works with Google, I'm finding their system significantly more frustrating to browse. One of my favourite things about art galleries is accidental discoveries - walking in for one thing, and wandering around for a while before accidentally finding something else amazing, that I'd never have thought to look for.
As one would expect from Google, their system is proving very helpful if I want to find a particular artist or a particular style - it's great for finding things when I know what I want. If I want to see just impressionists, great. If I want to see just Monet, great.
However, I'm actually finding I prefer just browsing through page after page of the Met's collection, precisely because it's not categorised and sorted to the nth degree.
Interestingly, I think it's representative of a broader problem that's creeping into society. Chance is an important element of discovery, and one that for some bizarre reason (or I suppose, for predictability of advertising), the Googles, Facebooks, etc of the world seem to be trying to eliminate. The focus on giving people what you (or an algorithm) think they want is what leads to things like echo chambers, through reduced exposure to different points of view.
On your point on algorithms removing the experience of discovery, I sometimes feel like there's something lost in getting your answer from the top comment on a Stack Overflow/Reddit post as opposed to digging through every response to a question on a forum, where I feel like you can gain more understanding of where the response came from.
Wow, surprised nobody linked to their GitHub page [1] which you can use for a local database of artist, reference number, URL, time period, license, etc.
As incredible as this technology is, the last thing modern art students need is more of is anti-social origin worship. This is a step back from media into medium, and a wholly worthless one in the context of contemporary art education. This is useful for historians alone. An utter distraction for someone looking to understand art.
I wanted to implement this as one of the first things while doing an online portfolio thing for art students. This and mailing lists. Sadly the company didn't make it that far.
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Seems like you're criticizing the powers that be that act as authorities for what should be considered art. The importance of this kind of criticism has been historically recognized by many artists and cultures for a long time [1][2][3][4][5][6], and will obviously continue to be relevant, so it's actually constructive that you brought it up even if you didn't mean for it to be so. But I think the most important thing to realize is that "art" isn't a monolithic thing — it means different things to different people. For some artworks are profitable commodities and socioeconomic status symbols, and for others its an anti-positivist exploration of what it means to be human. What it "really" is is an ongoing struggle between such differing points of view.
This is the first time I had heard of George Spencer-Brown and his primary algebra. At first glance, it looks like C.S.Peirce's existential graphs, without the quantifiers.
Off-topic rambling confounding art with the art industry. This is a website giving access to paintings.
Only insecure or needy craftsmen need the approval of some elite to feel like they're artists. Same with people seeing no value in art pieces and feeling rejected because some other people see value in them.
In the GP's defense, the idea that great art will inevitably now be reduced to templates for style transfer algorithms is not too far away from Google's idea that scanned Google Books will serve as fodder for a future AI, i.e. their purpose is not to be read by humans but by machines.
The choice of words is fairly strong but I guess the kind of person who is upset by philistinism feels strongly about it, art being a matter of personal feelings...
Well said, thank you! It was actually a self-criticism about some perception shifts I've noticed in myself after using this tech.
I'm excited to be on the cusp of upending human exceptionalism, especially in fields as emotionally precarious as art – a skill taken to be a rare specialization.
There's something wonderfully spooky about arriving at change this profound while thoughtful approach withers against the collective bedroom curiosity of a million Seymour Krelborns birthing an organism with nothing more than a laptop they bought for college.
Thanks for this, I am going to point her to this collection.