The Google Art Project
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Screenshot of the Art Project website, showing Édouard Manet's In the Conservatory
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| Developer(s) | Google Inc. |
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| Initial release | February 1, 2011 |
| Stable release |
3 / 20 May 2013
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| Development status | Active |
| Website | www |
Google Art Project is an online platform through which the public can access high-resolution images of artworks housed in the initiative’s partner museums. The project was launched on 1 February 2011 by Google, in cooperation with 17 international museums, including the Tate Gallery, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; and the Uffizi, Florence.
The platform enables users to virtually tour partner museums’ galleries, explore physical and contextual information about artworks, and compile their own virtual collection. The "walk-through" feature of the project uses Google's Street View technology. The images of many of the artworks were reproduced with very high quality, and each partner museum selected one artwork to be captured as a gigapixel image (with over 1 billion pixels).
On April 3, 2012, Google announced a major expansion to the Art Project as it signed partnership agreements with 151 museums from 40 countries. The platform now features more than 32,000 artworks from 46 museums, and the image acquisition process is underway at the remaining partner museums. This expansion includes works from institutions like the Art Gallery of Ontario, the White House, the Australian Rock Art Gallery at Griffith University, the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Additionally, Google launched a second, improved version of the website with new Google+ features, enhanced search capabilities, and a series of educational tools. Google intended for this second-generation platform to be a global resource; accordingly, the Art Project is now available in 18 languages, including English, Japanese, Indonesian, French, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese.
The Art Project emerged as a result of Google’s “20-percent time” policy, by which employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time working on an innovative project of interest. A small team of employees created the concept for the Art Project after a discussion on how to use Google technology to make museums’ artwork more accessible. The Art Project concept fits Google's mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." Accordingly, in mid-2009, Google executives agreed to support the project, and they engaged online curators of numerous museums to commit to the initiative.
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