Google’s Art Project Makes Museums Accessible to All

I don’t know which side of me is geeking out more at the launch of Google’s Art Project, the web developer or the fine art student. The platform is amazing but even more impressive is the art within.

Not content to bring art alone, Google offers entire museums to online visitors with street view technology. Imagine navigating your way through your own private tour through your choice of 17 prestigious art museums around the world. Even better than being able to view the art uninterrupted and at your own pace, you can inspect the installations so closely that you can see the brush strokes. Saving the cost of a field trip, anyone can catch a glimpse of art and how it’s displayed in Prague, Moscow, Amsterdam, Washington D.C. and many more esteemed locales.



Linking the museums, their exhibits and all the information the internet has to offer, the Art Project is likely the largest fine art collective database in existence. It aims to be the most user friendly as well. With features like drop down menus for browsing specific museums or search functions that sort out artists, students to seniors can learn background stories on all their favorite artwork. The project connects people to the art they see by allowing them to add paintings to their online collections or save snap shots from up-close inspection of the high resolution images to encourage discussion.

Even more amazing is the experience that the Google team entrusted with the endeavor had as they breathed life into the project. Capturing every crevice of the museums and recording every brush stroke in high definition Google employees were allowed to interact with these amazing artifacts in an intimate and unimaginable way. Maybe I can get a job with them for the next round of museums they add!

By Heather Fairchild - Heather is a multimedia developer with experience in web, film, photography and animation as well as traditional fine arts like painting and sculpting. In addition to writing for CommunicationsJobsBlog.net, she is co-founder of design and promotion company, Creative Kazoo with fellow Nexxt blogger, Staci Dennis. Heather’s spare time consists of making puppets, teaching Sunday School, building Legos and doing science experiments with her children.