Miles's blog

Yesterday Meg and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We always enjoy going to art museums and art galleries together.  Meg enjoys it because it gives her a great opportunity to argue with her father.  She is deliberately argumentative about the artistic value of things like canvasses painted white and basketballs floating in fish tanks.  We spent a lot of time in the Impressionists area, art which I think it is fair to say is timeless.

Going to world class museums is one of the best things about being in New York.  I am lucky to be able to see great and classic art.  However, through the genius of the people at Google, all of us can enjoy great artwork from around the world.  The Google Art Project has gone to dozens of museums around the world and photographed thousands of works of art, primarily paintings but also sculpture and other kinds of art.  For example, they have a photo of my favorite thing at the Met—The Temple of Dendur.  This thousands of years old building stands in a room built specially for it.  Because these are digital photos you can zoom in.  For some of the paintings you can zoom down to the magnifying glass level.

Each piece has a description, which is more or less expansive about the creation of the piece.  Many also have the provenance, or the history of the work.  Art is worthless without sufficient proof of what it is and where it has been since it was created.  Forgeries and stolen works are a real issue in the art world.  (If you want to read more about this read “Priceless” by Robert Wittman a former FBI agent whose full-time job was to recover stolen artwork.)

Accessing the Google Art Project is a lesson in the history of art.  There are so many items from so many museums that virtually every period of art is included, and there are items from all over the world.  I plan to spend hours getting an education by looking at pieces from places in the world I will never go, like Florence, Hong Kong, and Qatar.  There are ways to set up your own galleries (although I could not get it to work) so you can always review your favorite art.  (And god damn it, I will keep trying to get it to work, starting with Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”)