Nearly 1,000 Paintings and Drawings by Vincent van Gogh Digitized and Put Online

This is quite an amazing collection, and great for archiving purposes.

But, (I can't help myself), I am conflicted about the digitization of museums/artists/artworks. Seeing a work of art, let alone one of the greats, is something that should be experienced in person. Reducing it to pixels for instant digestion is a sub-optimal way to experience it.

Granted, this is amazing to research and exposure, and for distribution to those who wouldn't normally be able to see it - but I fear that it takes something away from the art.

If you are involved in the contemporary art scene at all, you may have noticed that works are beginning to become 'instagram' friendly - from paintings that look good on the internet but are ultimately shallow, 'installations' that generate a lot of hype and look good on your Story (a la Infinity Mirrors [0]), to hordes of people taking selfies with the Mona Lisa instead of appreciating it [1].

Maybe that's just the way things will progress in the Art world. But, imo, it is more important than ever to appreciate and continue creating the physical, tangible, beauty of art in an ever increasing digital world.

[0]http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-kusama-mi...

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/arts/design/mona-lisa-ins...

> Reducing it to pixels for instant digestion is a sub-optimal way to experience it.

Sure. But actually seeing a work of art in person requires that you can afford to travel there, and that you can actually watch the work in peace. I am not sure what the best way to view a work like the Mona Lisa (to name an extreme example) is, but being jostled along in a crowd of Chinese surely isn't it.

Woah. In an ML class I took last fall we got to design our own classification challenge problems that the entire class then competed on.

The one our group made used this exact dataset (the museum website)! We called it VANGOGHORNO haha. We basically pulled the images from the collection and mixed them with non-Van Gogh paintings. It was surprisingly a very learnable dataset, the top two teams got around 97% accuracy and many teams got to 90%. We resized the images and included paintings from vaguely similar styles like impressionism so we were surprised people did that well. I think the top team used some kind of transfer learning to identify entities in the paintings and learned from that.

I kind of disagree - many paintings are actually better experienced on print or online than in real life. Just take your example of Mona Lisa - you will get a better impression of the art from a good reproduction than from watching it behind glass surrounded by hordes of tourists at the Louvre. It is a relatively small painting and you can't even get close! Many classic paintings are awkwardly placed with bad lighting and so on. Some museums hang paintings in multiple rows, so you have to be a giraffe to enjoy half of them. Digitalization on the other hand is typically done under perfect light and viewing conditions.

In any case, for most ordinary people it is totally unrealistic to travel to museums all over the world to enjoy the real paintings.

or the capella sistina. Trying to push you ass through a sea of people is not art experience.