Google's Arts and Culture project launched in 2011 in partnership with 17 of the world's most renowned museums. The collaboration has since grown to include over 1500 museums and cultural institutions around the world. With the aim of making culture more accessible, the project has digitized millions of cultural artifacts and made them available online for anyone to access.
Google Arts and Culture is also available as a mobile app.
Check out this blog post from Google highlighting 20 hidden treasures from the millions of objects housed on the platform.
Google Arts and Culture has a wealth of content and features that you could spend days exploring and discovering. Here are some of the most useful functions:
Using Google Street-View technology, users can take virtual tours of any of Google's partner institutions around the world. Whether it's a tour of The Frick Collection, wandering the halls of the Natural History Museum in London or exploring historic houses in Kabul's old city, users get an opportunity to see the artifacts in real-life context. |
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Google Arts and Culture has powerful search capabilities to help users easily and intuitively find artworks. Filter searches according to artist, museum, medium, date, country, art movement, historic events, or even colors. The Arts and Culture platform can also recommend related artworks based on any of these same criteria.
Check out Paul Cézanne's artworks organized by color profile. |
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Using high-tech cameras Google captured some artworks as a gigapixel image (over 1 billion pixels). There are thousands of high resolution images that allow users to zoom in to see unparalleled levels of detail. For example, zoom in to see the brushstrokes in Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night. |
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Using your Google account you can create your own collections of artworks and artifacts. In order to start your own gallery:
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Google Arts and Culture has a wealth of educational content built into the platform. This includes online exhibitions, curatorial notes for specific artworks and hundreds of video interviews and essays. There are also a number of Arts and Culture Experiments, using technology to explore and gain new perspectives on the collections. The video content can also be found on Google Arts and Culture's Youtube channel. Check out the exhibition, 'The Address of Vermeer's Little Street Discovered'. |