Google’s art treasures you can match to sofa cushions
Tech company defends online artworks saying it is reinventing museums as more than buildings
GOOGLE is helping to revolutionise the very definition of museums, its arts chief has said, after the technology company unveiled artificial intelli- gence that can match your sofa cushions or children’s drawings to the world’s great paintings.
Critics have expressed fears that Google’s art project, which puts millions of images from museum collections online and allows users to match their selfies to portraits, will create a generation that accesses art only via a smartphone.
Amit Sood, director of Google Arts and Culture, rejected the criticism, saying that museums and galleries needed to respond to the changing landscape by doing more than display paintings and artefacts.
Asked if the company was creating a problem for the viability of museums, Mr Sood said: “Museums have a role to make their spaces different. I think this is not a problem, this is an opportunity, because you are changing the definition of the word ‘museum’ from it being a building.”
He gave the example of Tate Modern’s Superflex installation in the Turbine Hall, which features swings and a colourful carpet on which visitors are encouraged to sit or lie down. Parents should take their children to physical museums if they can, Mr Sood said, but in great swathes of the world that is impossible and the internet is the only means to access art.
“In the West we are so used to having these masterpieces and this cultural heritage on our doorstep,” he said.
“But not every country will be able to build hundreds of physical structures and acquire hundreds of millions of artworks. It’s just not practical.”
At the Google Lab in Paris this week, Mr Sood and his team unveiled their latest experiments. The first is Art Palette, in which a user chooses a colour and an algorithm instantly brings up a series of artworks featuring that exact shade.
Google believes it has many practical applications, from inspiring fashion designers to allowing home owners to find an art print that does not clash with their sofa cushions.
Another experiment, which is at the prototype stage, is Draw to Art. Likely to be addictive, it invites users to draw The Arts Council has now allocated a new £14.4m fund to “cultivate individual talent”, explicitly underlining it is open to artists of all ages.
Over four years, it will offer grants of between £2,000 and £10,000 to writers, artists, actors, musicians and other creatives to buy them the necessary time to work on projects. Unlike other funds, it will not require immediate proof of success or stipulate that art must benefit a wider community, and can be used to give successful applicants breathing space to knuckle down to perfect their work alone.
Sir Nicholas said: “I think that both artists and performers, and probably particularly writers, quite often find themselves beginning to become creative in their thirties or forties rather than in their twenties.” directly onto a smartphone or tablet screen, then brings up artworks bearing the closest resemblance.
They follow the success Google Art selfie feature.
Mr Sood said that his team was constantly looking to make art accessible “and if that entry point means taking a selfie and matching it to an 18th-century portrait that has been visited maybe 50 times in the past five years in a remote part of the country, I’m sorry, but that’s a win-win for the museum, for the artwork and for the user”. of the