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

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

#71

Post by stephenhuey »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #67

Van Gogh has a special meaning for me, because it's the first time I was fascinated with a painting. To put things into context: my mom is an art historian, and when I was a kid she'd regularly drag me to museums. I remember being bored out of my mind, with only the cool architecture of the museums themselves to mildly entertain me. To this day I'm pretty uninterested in the classics Years later, in my late 20s, I we…

I never appreciated Van Gogh very much until I saw his large mesmerizing paintings in person at the museum in Amsterdam.

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

#72

Post by Regardsyjc »

protonimitate wrote: post #2

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 distribut…

If anyone's interested in this dilemma I recommend Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction from 1936.

One of the critical arguments that many are making here was access. Copies allow many people to access art opposed to the privileged. Benjamin also makes a huge case about the value of the original.

To go even deeper, I also studied video game history and preservation, and what happens when the "original" is electronic? Many people today are making electronic art whether books, photos, illustrations, music, films, video games, but we may also be losing much because there isn't much being done for preservation. Like how we lost hundreds of films because Hollywood studios did not care about preservation until too late, it's even worse for video games. On the plus side, it means anyone who cares enough will be able to preserve and write history how they want.

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

#73

Post by Regardsyjc »

Dowwie wrote: post #66

I highly recommend the movie "Loving Vincent". It is a paint-animated film about part of Van Gogh's life.

I also recommend Van Gogh: Painted with Words, a BBC biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch who acts and narrates Van Gogh's letters.

If you like Doctor Who, there's an episode on Van Gogh with Bill Nighy that's sweet and sci-fi silly but they have an incredible scene where they animate one of Van Gogh's paintings. Sort of like the 360 degree VR animation of Starry Sky that is floating around Facebook.

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

#74

Post by red75prime »

theoh wrote: post #60
hiccuphippo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a cool use case for VR headsets.

It would also be The End for physical museums. If the appearance of the painting (the "frontal" lightfield under optimal illumination) has been recorded and securely stored... the physical substance of the painting becomes something that is only maintained for sentimental reasons. It's a basic premise of science and engineering that, if you have the recipe, you don't need the artifact. See Walter Benjamin etc on the…

> There's no way to transfer consciousness from the biological to the electronic substrate

Transferring? You are thinking small. What about expanding beyond your brain, so that it becomes a small part of a whole and by the time it starts failing it's just a peripheral input preprocessing device/local motion planner/unreliable redundant memory storage/small vote in global decision making and not you.

The possibility is still pretty far. Reliable biocompatible high throughput brain computer interfaces aren't there yet.

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

#75

Post by nemo1618 »

Don't mind me, just sharing my favorite Van Gogh self portrait: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0016V1962

The long, aligned strokes give the painting a feeling of motion and gravity, like bits of ferrous metal revealing a magnetic field. And the fact he put green in his beard -- and pulled it off flawlessly -- never ceases to amaze me. It's almost psychedelic.

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

#76

Post by bnegreve »

ArcticCelt wrote: post #14
rococode wrote: post #6

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…

Is there some downloadable archive file of all painting in the higher resolution or did you simply roll your own web scraper?

In case you're looking for supervised art datasets for machine learning, I made a little art-movement classifier you may be interested in.

Demo here: https://bit.ly/2xClNHz

data and models are available for download.

You can also have a look at art500k which is essentially the same thing. http://smedia.ust.hk/james/projects/deepart_ana.html

Their dataset is also available for download.

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

#77

Post by Jamerson »

red75prime wrote: post #74
theoh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be The End for physical museums. If the appearance of the painting (the "frontal" lightfield under optimal illumination) has been recorded and securely stored... the physical substance of the painting becomes something that is only maintained for sentimental reasons. It's a basic premise of science and engineering that, if you have the recipe, you don't need the artifact. See Walter Benjamin etc on the…

> There's no way to transfer consciousness from the biological to the electronic substrate Transferring? You are thinking small. What about expanding beyond your brain, so that it becomes a small part of a whole and by the time it starts failing it's just a peripheral input preprocessing device/local motion planner/unreliable redundant memory storage/small vote in global decision making and not you. The possibility i…

How about slowly replacing brain cells with synthetic ones while maintaining the consciousness in place?

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

#78

Post by Jamerson »

nemo1618 wrote: post #75

Don't mind me, just sharing my favorite Van Gogh self portrait: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0016V1962 The long, aligned strokes give the painting a feeling of motion and gravity, like bits of ferrous metal revealing a magnetic field. And the fact he put green in his beard -- and pulled it off flawlessly -- never ceases to amaze me. It's almost psychedelic.

Do all these seem low contrast? I find it hard to believe that he painted down in value like this constantly. He'd have to mix every color with grey. It seems much more likely to be a weird photography setup.

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

#79

Post by robin_reala »

Confiks wrote: post #52
robin_reala wrote: post #12

As nice as this is, it would have been even better if they’d used an understandable CC licence instead of the custom non-commercial sub-A4 one they’ve decided on. There are at least a couple of museums now that have licenced their entire digital artworks as CC0[1][2], and I’ve been talking to Munchmuseet in Oslo recently who are planning to licence their entire new digitised collection[3] as CC4 (free use with attrib…

I really don't understand your comment, and all subsequent responses along the same line. The digitized van Gogh paintings are perfect copies of the original public domain works. For the US, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. [1] makes it perfectly clear that the images are not protected by copyright, and there is similar law and legislation in Europe. What do you mean with the ability of the museums to choose a li…

I believe the problem lies in the wording of ‘exact’. Without a direct comparison to the source material ‘exact’ could be challenged. There’s also the problem of exact dating of a piece of art as being pre-1923. With a reproduction in a published book you have a publishing date in the colophon that logically must be the same year or later than the reproduction of the artwork inside. Without that you’re relying on the artist’s date of death or supporting material such as an original bill of sale to make the distinction.

Basically, the problem is that when you’re releasing a derivative work with CC0 you need to be 100% sure that your original licensing is correct. We’re probably being overly-cautious, but luckily the imprint style allows us to be.

(The A4 licence comes from their T&Cs PDF: “Images of the Van Gogh Museum collection up to and including A4 size in TIF format may be downloaded and distributed for non-commercial use”.)

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

#80

Post by olavk »

labster wrote: post #23
olavk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lightin…

This is true of Mona Lisa, where you wait in a huge line to get 3 meters away from the portrait, and have maybe a couple minutes to look at best. Reproductions win out there. But for Van Gogh, they do a terrible job a capturing the heavy texture of the paint. On flat paper he's a decent artist, cool expressionist style. But the real things feel alive; they have physical depth and draw the viewer into the painting. It…

Oh yeah didn't mean to imply it was always the case. Certainly the physicality of the painting is a bit part of the experience, especially for the artist which work consciously with the three-dimensionality of the paint.
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