Virtual expeditions to museums

At the 17th of March this year, a new app has entered our world, called Impasto Art. This app brings masterpieces from the finest museums to the screen of your TV. While connecting your smartphone with your smartTV, streaming masterworks such as Girl with a Pearl Earring in original size is made possible. Of course, this possibility depends on the size of your screen, however, you now can enhance your living room, office or restaurant with every art you like. The images are in Full-HD, and offered in high resolution, free and worldwide available via IPhone.

Google Art

Linked to this new application is Google Art, an app that is part of the Google Cultural Institute.They updated this app last Thursday, to expand the online database from 2D art from whole world to at least 300 masterpieces in 3D. Scan technology of Google makes it possible to zoom from different perspectives into a certain piece of art. Audio tours and videos bring the audience into contact with museum collections and street art, besides it is made possible to watch an online-guided tour trough several museums.

With the use of this kind of digital art technology, high cultural productions, masterpieces and art from whole world comes to the living space of the audience. We don't have to travel and to pay a ticket for museums anymore. We now can see the catalogues from museums in for instance England and US in one day while drinking our coffee or lying in our bed before going to sleep.

Thus, the good thing is that people who don't have the money to pay tickets, to travel or are physically disabled, can see every piece of art from home. The access to art has become less regulated and more open. On the other hand, this digitalization of art, and replacement of its context into our personal situations, has some consequences of how we might interpret certain values on the original object. Does this now is transformed in just a sample of reproduction? If the digital spread of the image itself is overruling the value of original pieces of art, what is the function of museums in the future?

I have to admit the fact that this technology is come up while we already spread the image and its original context by reproducing pieces of art on pillows, paperwork, clothes, bags, pictures and so on. Walter Benjamin (1935) who is a scholar of Frankfurt School has his theories about this question of authenticity when the age of mechanical reproduction has begun:

'Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.'

Visiting a Museum

I wander how this new media platform of spreading art is influencing our behavior of visiting museums. It is possible the popularity of art will arise and more people will spend their spare time with family and friends to visit museums. First reason: The expanding images of masterpieces whether 2D or 3D into the lives of the public, could make this public curious to the element which is lacking, described by Benjamin. Furthermore, the design, idea and production of Impasto Art and Google Art is founded by museums and art-institutions, to expand the knowledge of art, or in other words, to promote their collection. The only thing the public has to do is downloading the app and clicking several times on their mouse, to explore the world of art, collected in the digital media.

What about the artist itself? Historical masterpieces are made by people who don't exist anymore, however, if my fantasy starts running, maybe in the future they can get involved in designing the online world of art by for instance creating certain forums where fans can discuss their experience of watching, adding videos online where they promote their online images and asking people to go visiting the original work after exploring the image online. To get the public more active, it would be great to create the possibility to add self-made pieces of art to the database. By collecting information about the popularity of certain online images, museums can use this information by their decisions to organize exhibitions. In this way the system of producing, spreading and visiting masterpieces and mainstream art resembles the way music is taking place in popular culture. The original song written and played by musicians is spread by different media platforms, and via trans media transformed into times and places that differs from the original song, and gives new meanings to the sounds.  Ending this analyzation of Impasto Art and Google Art positively, virtual worlds of art opens many possibilities to create a platform of creativity, which increases the power of the public in regulation of creating collecting and distributing art.