14 DAY TRIAL // Google's Art Project is one of the company's most interesting projects. It's designed to bring online copies of famous (or less famous, but equally valuable) works of art, holed up in museums around the world.
There's nothing like seeing a masterpiece for yourself, but few people get the chance to travel all over the world and see the works in person.
Art Project, with its high-resolution scans, makes it possible to appreciate the works, sometimes even better than in real life, thanks to details that won't be visible to the naked eye.
In Art Project, you can even move around some of the museums thanks to Street View-like panoramic images.
However, this is where it gets tricky: Google can't actually show you the photos of all the paintings in the museums. Some of the museums, or the owners who loaned them the art, don't want copies of particular paintings on the Internet.
There's no point in arguing whether a low-resolution photo of a painting is fair use or not, but the museums wouldn't have let Google in had they not been able to blur some of the paintings.
But that's not to say some good can't come out of this. One British artist, Phil Thompson, became so fascinated with the smudges that replaced the actual paintings in the Museum View photos, that he commissioned actual paintings of those smudges.
He has now collected some of those reproductions and exhibited them in a gallery, under the Copyrights name. While he was able to find out what the original artworks behind the blur were, he didn't disclose this in his reproductions.
He wanted them to stand on their own, as a commentary on both how the digital world is able to expand culture and how the commoditization of culture, thanks to the Internet, transforms it.
The fact that the paintings were commissioned with a Chinese company that makes oil paintings of anything you send it only strengthened the point of view.