Hasta La Ideas

A collaboration between Google and 17 of the world’s top art galleries and museums, including the National Gallery and Tate Britain in the UK, the Google Art Project takes the Street View approach into the gallery

With Google Art Project, users can wander around 17 of the world’s top galleries and museums and view 1,061 artworks. There are also 17 special gigapixel images – one for each participating institution’s most treasured piece, allowing viewers to zoom right in to brush-stroke levels of detail.

Over the past 18 months, a Google team has been zipping around the likes of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Palace of Versailles using trolley mounted cameras to photograph corridors and galleries. Users can explore each gallery from room to room or create their own collections of masterpieces.

This video explains a little about how it was all done

and the project is explained in more detail here

The full list of participating museums is as follows:

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin – Germany
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC – USA
The Frick Collection, NYC – USA
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin – Germany
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC – USA
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC – USA
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid – Spain
Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid – Spain
Museum Kampa, Prague – Czech Republic
National Gallery, London – UK
Palace of Versailles – France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg – Russia
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow – Russia
Tate Britain, London – UK
Uffizi Gallery, Florence – Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands

The launch of Street View was quickly followed by all manner of creative ‘hacks’ drawing on the newly available data – we wonder what willl follow from Art Project?