Can Google make you care about art?
New app feature matches users’ self-portraits to world’s most famous paintings
SAN FRANCISCO— Internet users started doing something strange recently: posting selfies accompanied by famous works of art.
It all sprang from the sudden popularity of something called the Google Arts & Culture app, which introduced a new feature that uses facial recognition to match a person’s likeness to a renowned painting that hangs in a museum somewhere in the world.
The Google art app is actually a few years old. But the “Search with your selfie” feature, introduced in December, started catching on about a week ago, thanks in part to a BuzzFeed article and some old-fashioned internet virality.
There was a nice irony to the rapid spread of art selfies across the web. Just as Facebook was pledging to move away from gaudy videos and streams of suffocating political commentary, here was Google coming to the rescue, giving everyone a reason to start posting pictures of themselves again.
Google’s art project got its start in 2011, as the side venture of an Android marketer named Amit Sood, who was devoting his “20 per cent time” at the company to exploring how to make art more accessible online. Sood grew up in Mumbai, where he says people reflexively thought of art “as a posh experience, and not something that was for me or for my people.” He wanted to change that. Sood initially approached 17 museums about collaborating on the project and later combined it with similar efforts inside Google.
His group developed a robotic art camera that allows museums to make highly detailed images of their works and eventually enlisted more than 1,500 museums in more than 70 countries.
Two years ago, it introduced the smartphone app, which provides access to museums’ online collections, virtual reality tours and guides to artwork along particular themes, such as Black history and culture.
The app was decently popular, but Sood says he knew it wasn’t exactly enrapturing users. “Everyone said, ‘This is great, but . . . ’ ” he recalls. The challenge was to be not just educational but “simple and fun for people who are intimidated about even entering the art world.”
Then in 2016, Sood gave a presentation about the Google Arts & Culture project at the TED conference in Vancouver.
His co-presenter, French digital interaction artist Cyril Diagne, asked if he had ever thought of integrating selfies into the project. “Selfies are a bit narcissistic,” Sood recalls replying at first. “I just didn’t see the connection immediately.”
Nevertheless, the pair included a nice gimmick in their presentation that they called the “portrait matcher,” automatically synchronizing the orientation of Diagne’s head with portraits in Google’s art database that exhibited similar posture. The TED audience loved it.
Google engineers spent the next 20 months working on a more sophisticated version of the idea, using facial recognition software to compare characteristics of a user’s visage with similar ones in the portraits of Google’s art database.
When they released the tool in December, Sood says he didn’t expect much to come from it.
Well, last week, the app zoomed to No. 1 on the Android and iOS app stores, and people used it to take more than 40 million selfies. Celebrities including Kristen Bell, Ryan Seacrest, Kumail Nanjiani and Jack Dorsey posted their art doppelgangers. Actress Minnie Driver managed to nail a 100-per-cent match with Edvard Munch’s The Scream. One woman was matched with a portrait of her own grandmother.