Tag Archives: Duncan Osborn

Google Arts & Culture: an app for culture vultures

In its drive to take over single aspect of our lives in the most charming, helpful, and delightful ways possible, Google has developed its Arts & Culture app.

Here’s more from a July 19, 2016 article by John Brownlee for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

… Google has just unveiled a new app that makes it as easy to find the opening times of your local museum as it is to figure out who painted that bright purple Impressionist masterpiece you saw five years ago at the Louvre.

It’s called Google Arts & Culture, and it’s a tool for discovering art “from more than a thousand museums across 70 countries,” Google writes on its blog. More than just an online display of art, though, it encourages viewers to parse the works and gather insight into the visual culture we rarely encounter outside the rarified world of brick-and-mortar museums.

For instance, you can browse all of Van Gogh’s paintings chronologically to see how much more vibrant his work became over time. Or you can sort Monet’s paintings by color for a glimpse at his nuanced use of gray.

You can also read daily stories about subjects such as stolen Nazi artworks or Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. …

A July 19, 2016 post announcing the Arts & Culture app on the Google blog by Duncan Osborn provides more details,

Just as the world’s precious artworks and monuments need a touch-up to look their best, the home we’ve built to host the world’s cultural treasures online needs a lick of paint every now and then. We’re ready to pull off the dust sheets and introduce the new Google Arts & Culture website and app, by the Google Cultural Institute. The app lets you explore anything from cats in art since 200 BCE to the color red in Abstract Expressionism, and everything in between.

• Search for anything, from shoes to all things gold • Scroll through art by time—see how Van Gogh’s works went from gloomy to vivid • Browse by color and learn about Monet’s 50 shades of gray • Find a new fascinating story to discover every day—today, it’s nine powerful men in heels

You can also use this app when visiting a real life museum. For the interested, you can download it for for iOS and Android.