Art in the News

Talk About Ambitious!

2015-05-12T05:44:00.000-07:00

Check out the World Digital Library, a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the UNESCO. Arranged by theme, time, place, language, this intriguing resource expands our access to cultural material outside the English speaking world.

The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures. Go Library of Congress!

Here is the link::http://www.wdl.org/en/topic/

Take This Quiz Like A Liberal Arts Boss!

2015-04-22T06:42:00.003-07:00

A Centre education comes in handy at cocktail parties and at ruling over internet quizzes! A little late for April Fool's Day, but of course, I am only joking. Critical thinking skills come in handy every day and everywhere! But just because Centre helped you become a better thinker doesn't mean you can't have a little fun.

So, try your luck at this little painting identification quiz from Slate!
/art_quiz_name_these_paintings_from_a_small_detail.html

Preaching to the Choir!

2015-04-13T07:38:00.003-07:00

Tom Eblen, columnist for the Herald-Leader (and father of Centre alumna and art major Shannon Eblen) has written an excellent essay about the value of learning visual analysis. Click the link to read about why everyone from medical students to detectives are benefiting from learning close observation: studying-great-art-can-help-improve-everyday-observation-skills/

Visit the GoogleArt Project Again!

2015-03-20T06:24:00.001-07:00

The Google Art Project isn't new, but it just keeps getting better and better! It now contains over 45,000 images viewable in super high resolution. And check out the street view "indoor" option to do a virtual walk through of some galleries. The latest flourish is the Google Art Project extension

Add it to your Chrome browser and get a new art image with every tab you open. It is beautiful!

Virtual Reality Museum

2015-02-19T06:12:00.001-08:00

Thieves have taken art from all over the world, robbing not just museums and collectors but all of us, stealing our opportunity to experience these masterworks. The painting above is a Rembrandt stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. The thirteen artworks stolen that day have never been recovered.

Check out this new project, the Virtual-Reality Museum to see the art digitally restored to its proper (virtual) place. An interesting project that brings together art, computing and international crime. http://www.wired.com/2015/01/see-worlds-greatest-stolen-artworks-virtual-reality-museum/?mbid=social_fb

All Reproductions Are Not Equal

2015-01-07T07:53:00.001-08:00

Which Madame X is the correct Madame X?

Google image search is a wonderful thing. I get why we all love it. But if you are interested in accuracy, there are some compelling reasons to become a more sophisticated searcher.Above you can see a reproduction of John Singer Sargent's "Madame X" from 1883-84, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum's own image is on the left.

On the right you can see a photo collage called "18 Madames X" created from the top hits of a Google image search. Which of those hits would you have chosen?

Notice not only the many different color casts, but in the Metropolitan reproduction, there is great subtlety in the shading of the skin and the painting is not cropped, thus the relationship between the placement of the figure to the painting as a whole is how Sargent intended it to be seen.
http://hint.fm/reproduction/18-madames-x.html
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/12127

Freer/Sackler Galleries Lead the Way

2015-01-05T08:07:00.000-08:00

The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian and American art are opening a marvelous new digital archive of all their holdings. Beginning January 1st, these museums will offer 40,000 digital images, most at high resolution and completely without copyright restrictions. Read here for more information: http://www.asia.si.edu/press/2014/digitization.asp

Seeing The Great Depression Anew

2014-08-29T07:37:00.001-07:00

The Library of Congress offers us access to the incredible photographs of the Farm Security Administration. These iconic photos (over 175,000) have been digitized and tagged and made available to us all. But wait, it gets better. Yale University has taken this data and enriched it in a new project called Photogrammar. The photos can now be explored by photographer, where the photo was taken, and by theme. More tools are still in the works.

The Meadow of Images for Scholarship Blooms

2014-05-20T05:49:00.002-07:00

The Metropolitan Museum joins the rising tide of museums offering high-quality images for free scholarly use. 400,000 images are available for non-commercial use directly from the Met website. Check here for more information on this great news.

Available images will be marked Open Access for Scholarly Content or OASC.

Digital Art History

2014-04-30T07:40:00.002-07:00

An interesting interview in the Wall Street Journal with James Cuno, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, discussing the future of art history and how technology can create new methods of art historical analysis. Look here to read more about bringing computing power and art history together in enlightening new ways.

Slow food? How about slow art?

2014-04-23T07:04:00.001-07:00

What if you had five minutes? And you spent it with a work of art?

Experiencing a work of art is a very different experience from seeing it projected in class or looking at it on a screen. Most museum visitors spend from a few seconds to a couple of minutes in front of an art work. What happens when we really stop and look? That is what the slow art movement is proposing. Read this interesting article from The Getty Institute here.

Happy 125th Birthday to the Eiffel Tower!

2014-03-31T07:08:00.001-07:00

The Tower was considered unsightly and embarrassing when it was first built, Parisians who objected to the structure used their best insults, calling it a "truly tragic street lamp." How times have changed! Most of us adore this symbol of Paris. Check out this photo essay celebrating this notable monument. eiffel-tower

Right Side of the Law?

2014-03-10T06:36:00.003-07:00

An interesting move by the Getty Photo Agency makes millions of its images available for free, via an embed. This article discusses what is in it for The Getty, as well as for image consumers. Interesting to see how this issue is evolving. Check it out at: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/why-getty-going-free-is-such-a-big-deal-explained-in-getty-images/284264/

Science Fiction meets Gaming meets Art

2014-02-27T06:40:00.000-08:00

An interesting piece from NPR about what makes great art famous. Is it because it is the best or because of some other factor? Read more here to find out about alternate world paths where the Mona Lisa does not become the world's most famous painting. good-art-is-popular-because-its-good-right

Islamic Art Resource

2014-02-12T07:27:00.002-08:00

Students of Islamic art will want to check out this revamped on-line resource! Archnet offers articles and images for Islamic art and architecture, both contemporary and historic. Take a look here: http://archnet.org/

The Beauty of Maps

2014-01-14T08:17:00.003-08:00

The Hereford "Mappa Mundi" is the largest intact medieval wall map in the world. It is rarely displayed but after a recent restoration there was a chance to see it outside its glass case. Such a wonderful photograph which shows the grand scale of the thing. Read the article here:
the-beauty-of-maps

Smoke and Mirrors: Did Vermeer Have a Secret?

2013-12-04T06:16:00.002-08:00

There is an intriguing article in this month's Vanity Fair about an inventor in Texas who become obsessed with Vermeer's paintings. Check out the article Vermeer's Secret Tool

Tim Jenison, a creator of hardware and software for video production, used his ingenuity to look at the paintings in an entirely new way. NPR also has an interview with Penn and Gillette, the makers of the documentary "Tims Vermeer" about how Jenison went about making his own version of Vermeer's "The Music Lesson". teller-breaks-his-silence-to-talk-tims-vermeer

Juxtapositions

2013-11-08T07:23:00.001-08:00

It looks like a wonderful exhibit opening at the Prado this month.

The Prado began its life as a natural history museum and Spanish artist Miguel Ángel Blanco wanted to evoke that origin by installing some of the finest objects from the National Museum of Natural Sciences alongside the gallery's more famous works.

"It occurred to me that I could create a contemporary cabinet, an artistic intervention that also showed off the natural history in the paintings that hang in the Prado," he said.

Colonial Williamsburg joins Google Art Project

2013-10-09T05:55:00.001-07:00

The fantastic Google Cultural Institute has just added material from Colonial Williamsburg to its collection.

Enjoy this portrait of George Washington, by Charles Willson Peale, 1780. In the midst of our government shutdown, it might be a good moment to contemplate some of our tumultuous history and iconic heroes. The Google projects lets you get up close and personal by clicking on any image. You can get close enough to see Washington's button holes and look him in the eye.

And, of course, there are many, many more wonderful images from all around the world.

The National Gallery of Art

2013-09-17T07:00:00.002-07:00

The National Gallery of Art has just relaunched its web site and it looks beautiful. A fine resource to research and gorgeous images to use in your scholarly projects. Take a look here: National Gallery Image Collection

Paintings Can Still Get you in Trouble

2013-08-30T06:46:00.000-07:00

Art is still a powerful form of protest. This painting of Vladimir Putin in lingerie was seized from a gallery in St. Petersburg. Police said it broke unspecified laws.Art as Protest

Useful Google Image Trick

2013-04-23T07:16:00.001-07:00

This was news to me, so I thought I would share it. Below is a quotation from an image librarian on my listserv:

"Whenever you want to know what an image is - right click or control click on the image - and click Save Image as... - save to your desktop. Then go to Google Images and simply pick up the image and drop it in the Image Search bar and VOILA! all the info you could possibly want on the image."

This worked for me, more or less I had a scanned image of a Teco vase and Google offered me images of skinny green things, so basically I stumped Google. But when I inserted an image of a mosaic from Pompeii that I had found on-line, Google Image came up with both more pictures of the same thing and a written suggestion of what the mosaic was. Pretty cool!

ARTstor News

2013-04-16T08:44:00.001-07:00

There are some changes at ARTstor to correct some image download problems.

ARTstor Digital Library image downloads will now come via zip files.Check here for complete information.

True Colors

2013-04-12T06:40:00.000-07:00

When can we trust our eyes and how do we evaluate the rich resources that the web brings to us. Technologists and artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have made a wonderful mosaic of image search results that can help us think about visualization.

"The web can seem like the perfect museum, holding all the world’s art. Type “Danae Klimt” into your favorite search engine, and you conjure up a high-resolution image of Gustav Klimt’s Danaë: tan limbs, a shower of gold, red hair.

Or did you find pink limbs? Or were they gray or even green? There’s the rub: the seemingly perfect museum holds dozens of Danaës—with dozens of different palettes. Even the shape changes as reproductions are subtly cropped.
Curious just how far reproductions stray from each other, we began an investigation. (Go directly to the results if you like.) For a set of famous artworks, we downloaded all the plausible copies we could find. Then we wrote software to reconstruct each artwork as a mosaic, a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy."

From the web site of technologists and artists, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. "We invent new ways for people to think and talk about data." http://hint.fm/

ARTstor Keeps on Growing!

2013-03-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

Imagine a free national library of images! It is happening and coming our way.

ARTstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide access to more than 10,000 high-quality images from six leading museums.This is great news for users. Single portal access to an ever greater and more diverse sea of images!

Check out the DPLA to see what they are all about here: http://dp.la/