Critics fear Google’s digitisation bid ‘kills’ the experience of art
Just seeing the Crayola colours painted on the tall iron fence of the 18thcentury hotel particulier made me shiver. The big panda in flip flops in the lobby, arms up in greeting, scared me. And the petite ham sandwiches getting wheeled around to Google staffers looked positively menacing.
The more playful Google gets, the more paranoid I get.
We are still trying to fathom whether the tech behemoth is a boon to society or, as Rupert Murdoch’s lieutenant Robert Thomson charges, a cynical, rapacious, “often unaccountable bureaucracy” running “a platform for piracy,” gobbling up all the intellectual property in the world for its own profit.
So when I heard that, building on its plan to digitise all books, Google had opened a Cultural Institute in Paris to digitally replicate and curate all art and culture on earth, I wanted to check it out. Europe is, after all, hostile territory for the Alphabet, with its highest court upholding an individual’s right to be forgotten and lawsuits looming over the tech giant’s suffocating business practices.
Despite the cheeky sign on the door of the grand building on Rue de Londres — “I’m feeling lucky” — I wasn’t the only one with mal de mer. When the institute had an opening party two years ago, the French culture minister was a no-show, warning about “an operation that still raises a certain number of questions”.
Meeting the head of the institute, Amit Sood, a Bombay native in his mid-30s, made me suspicious at first. Looking cozy in a long gray cardigan and black sneakers, he’s a preternaturally perfect ambassador, like a high-powered Google algorithm designed to co-opt museums and foundations so charmingly that curators will barely know they’d been appropriated. But the guy seems sincere.
“This is our biggest battle, this constant misunderstanding of why the Cultural Institute actually exists,” he said. “In France obviously there was a lot of scepticism about why is Google entering this domain.”
From the most famous paintings of the Uffizi to an archive of South Korean film to virtual galleries of the pyramids, the institute has already amassed an impressive collection. Mr Sood has serenely fielded the questions about whether his project will lead to people prowling museums from the comfort of their couch, filtering and missing out on actual visits.
“I’ve seen Starry Night at MoMA probably 30 times in person and I have the most high-resolution digitised image of that on my platform right now,” he said, “but every time I come to New York, I still go see Starry Night.”
He added that there was “awesome” data showing that “physical attendance at museums is rising at a rate never seen before, especially in countries and museums that have cool digital initiatives”.
To critics who accuse him of dumbing down art education, he says: “To some extent I do want to dumb down a few things, because I think some things are too highbrow at some point.” He talks about “the mom feature”: His Indian mom doesn’t care about Impressionists and thought he was “wasting” his life on this project, but when he showed her the gold jewellery from Bogotá, Israel and the Met on his site, she became a fan.
“So for me,” he said, “the route into the person’s mind to get more interested in culture, history or wonders can be many”.
Mr Sood was not an art aficionado when he and some colleagues launched the project at Mountain View, trying to come up with a way to make art in Western museums accessible to people in countries like India and make it look magical online, with the ability to zoom in on each brush stroke of the Chagall ceiling of the Paris Opera.
When Mr Sood lived in London, he went to museums just because the cafes were good places to meet interesting people. But now, he says, “I value what’s going on and I think you have to be patient. You can’t expect museums to move at the pace of the Internet.”
Mr Sood said Paris was chosen for the endeavour in order to confront the scepticism head on — “If I can convince them, I can convince practically everybody” — and as bait to recruit the best engineers.
“In Paris, it has not been easy,” he said. “But we’re getting there. More and more institutions are signing up.”
He has now lured in over 850 museums, archives and foundations in 61 countries and hired several people he first pitched the project to — experts from the German ministry of culture, the Met, the Tate and Versailles.
He and his colleague, Laurent Gaveau, have cast a wide net, creating an archive of street art, histories of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Lahore crafts and textiles and even — “out of our comfort zone” — Italian mozzarella, lemons and Balsamic vinegar.
They didn’t get to Palmyra to film the nearly 2,000-year-old temple there before the IS blew it up, but Mr Sood suggested they could re-create it online.
He has tried to soothe fears that technology ruins the experience of viewing art and that Google will gobble up content, offering museums a delete button that instantly removes all content from the site.
“I don’t care so much if they use Google or not, to be very blunt,” he said. “I care more that cultural institutions that have great stuff under lock and key put it out there for anybody to download. If they want to put it on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, be my guest.” Indeed, to show they aren’t gaming the system, he noted that if you Google “The Birth of Venus,” his site does not come up first. (It’s 10th.)
Could there be a digital version of one of those famous French art heists?
“Of course I could be hacked,” Mr Sood said, adding wryly, “I don’t know if there’s a teenager sitting somewhere wanting all the Rembrandts.”