Dear old Mom wanted to be an Artist when she grew up. She took one of those mail order courses where you draw a turtle and bought a lot of books containing the Works of The Masters. She sketched three things a day, and yet, she never got past that kind of middle school phase where her work looked ok, but never looked exactly like Art. I went through a small Artist phase myself, sketching and drawing and never becoming any better.
The Wife went to college and studied Art. She painted mostly abstracts on 3×4 foot canvases, with an occasional more realistic effort now and then. She also never advanced much past her initial stages, though some of her artwork shows that she was heading in the right direction.
My own art turned toward Photography when I discovered that I had more of a knack for capturing the world than creating it. I grew up visiting The Amon Carter Museum, The Children’s Museum-now The Museum of Science and History, The Modern Art Museum, and The Kimbell Art Museum. There was a brief time when I was flush and had a Membership to the Kimbell that offered advance viewings and discounts at the museum shop.
The Wife is not as impressed with Art as I am. She is perfectly content to flip through a coffee table book and finds no special attraction to being in the presence of the actual work of art. So I feel sure that she will find Google’s Art Project just as good as being there. I have always liked standing in from the paintings and thinking-I am standing where the artist stood when he painted this. Well, not really, but I still like the idea. One of the advantages of the Art Project over the real world is that there is no Guard standing near by to yell at you for getting too close to the Art.
Of course, it has been possible for some time to Google images of art, if you know the name of the work or the artist. But if you just want to randomly wander through the collection of MoMA or the Tate Modern, that was a little tougher. So now there are a handful of Art Museums you can visit in a sort of crude virtual reality. Back in the Dark Ages when CDs were all the rage, you could buy Art Collections on CDs just as you could buy libraries on CD.
Using the Art Project is easier than dragging out those coffee table books, and it is better in some ways than actually being there. No crowds to fight with, no being rushed from room to room, and on some of the images, like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, you can zoom in to individual dabs of paint. With so many Museums and so many works of art in the world, the Art Project seems a little light on content at the moment. But it is still well worth visiting and whiling away the occasonal hour.
