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The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

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Re: The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

#21

Post by forapurpose »

tptacek wrote: post #12
fermienrico wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it compare with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York?

It's a great museum, among the best museums (full stop) in the country, but it's less than 1/4 of the size of the Met.

True, but after a certain point size doesn't matter for the visitor. I can see only a small fraction of the Met in any visit; IIRC a prior director said he couldn't see the entire collection, including the majority which is not on display at any one time, in his lifetime. If the Met grows, it doesn't change the size from my perspective.

If you are interested in specific individual collections then size might matter; if you are interested in Polynesian art, then possibly you could exhaust the Met's or Chicago's collections (I don't know).

But in some respects the two museums are the same size. And to go off on a tangent, I now find that I gain much more by spending a long time, maybe 30 minutes each, with a few works of art, rather than spending a few minutes each with 100 works. So for me, a museum with 10 great (IMHO) works would be plenty big, and better than a museum with 100,000 works that I have to sort through or walk past to find the ones I'm interested in. (Though the odds that the 10-piece museum would have what I want are a bit longer.)

Re: The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

#22

Post by jmkd »

adriand wrote: post #10

This is pretty incredible. There was once a time when the only way for the average person to see a beautiful painting was to go to church. Later on this role was taken up by art galleries. Now anyone can see this stuff from the comfort of their own home. What do you think this means for the future of art galleries? What are they for ? Different ones are answering this question in different ways. Some are reinventing…

The advent of digital accessibility is far more impactful for local museums in smaller markets. These institutions now have access to global audiences who may never have heard of the museum (or even the town / city), would certainly never have visited in person, but are perhaps searching a wider database by artist, genre etc and encounter these small collections thus beginning a fruitful journey of potential engagement.

Re: The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

#23

Post by jmkd »

veridies wrote: post #16

Is there any sort of organized, searchable index of artwork online? It's sort of a massive undertaking, but it's the kind of thing that a wiki would be good for, and there have been a handful of different museums which have made these kinds of sets available.

Google Arts & Culture [1] aspires to this, and does a great job to a certain extent, however not at scale or in the long tail. For their own reasons institutions have resisted mass uploads to Google - despite the theoretical marriage of CC licences and G A&C non-profit contractual agreements. Art Institute Chicago has been a partner with Google since 2012 yet today we see only ~1% of their artworks on G A&C. [1] https://artsandculture.google.com/

Re: The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

#25

Post by mmmBacon »

The Art Institute has always been very forward looking when it comes to technology. In the mid 90s I was offered a job there creating a new collection tool for curators that would allow them to view ALL of the Art Institute’s collection and help them create new exhibits. I think only 10% of their collection at that time was on display. They were going to build the tool in C. They were also very progressive to hiring as I didn’t know C and the team was willing to teach me. It was a very cool job but I didn’t end up taking it.

Re: The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

#26

Post by slig »

matthberg wrote: post #8
tsumnia wrote: post #5

Is there a link to downloading copies of the images?

Here's the link, it's basically their collection page filtered by the ones they released, each artwork page has links to download the image. https://www.artic.edu/collection?is_public_domain=1

It's basically impossible to browse most of the pictures sequentially because the UI keeps loading new images on the bottom of the page after clicking "Load more" and the browser will crash after loading so many images on the same tab.

It's a shame, because it obvious that a lot of work and care was put on this project.

Re: The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

#27

Post by sizzle »

adriand wrote: post #10

This is pretty incredible. There was once a time when the only way for the average person to see a beautiful painting was to go to church. Later on this role was taken up by art galleries. Now anyone can see this stuff from the comfort of their own home. What do you think this means for the future of art galleries? What are they for ? Different ones are answering this question in different ways. Some are reinventing…

Virtual reality gallery viewing from your living room will be a thing, it's possible now just a matter of time they hook up these databases of art and perfect the gallery viewing experience to make it accessible.

Re: The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

#28

Post by mistrial9 »

adriand wrote: post #10

This is pretty incredible. There was once a time when the only way for the average person to see a beautiful painting was to go to church. Later on this role was taken up by art galleries. Now anyone can see this stuff from the comfort of their own home. What do you think this means for the future of art galleries? What are they for ? Different ones are answering this question in different ways. Some are reinventing…

IMO you will need to pivot to calendar-based activity that involves people on your premises ..

Re: The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

#29

Post by ohnonotyouagain »

On a technical note, the Art Institute of Chicago images are being served using an API called IIIF, which allows you to scale, extract regions of interest, etc. [1]. There are about 1-2B images worldwide being served from museums and libraries using the API [2] and viewers that can work with the content from multiple institutions at the same time, for instance to compare two van Gogh self-portraits from different museums: http://projectmirador.org/demo/

[1] https://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/#image-request-uri-syntax [2] https://iiif.io/community/#participating-institutions

Re: The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online

#30

Post by exodust »

jmkd wrote: post #23
veridies wrote: post #16

Is there any sort of organized, searchable index of artwork online? It's sort of a massive undertaking, but it's the kind of thing that a wiki would be good for, and there have been a handful of different museums which have made these kinds of sets available.

Google Arts & Culture [1] aspires to this, and does a great job to a certain extent, however not at scale or in the long tail. For their own reasons institutions have resisted mass uploads to Google - despite the theoretical marriage of CC licences and G A&C non-profit contractual agreements. Art Institute Chicago has been a partner with Google since 2012 yet today we see only ~1% of their artworks on G A&C. [1] http…

Unfortunately the images cannot be downloaded from Google Art Project (original name).

It's irritating having to jump over complicated hurdles to get a seamless hi-res image capture from Google Arts. It requires some messing about, but I previously managed to grab about 100 high res images, but it took ages and was not easy. They printed out nicely in the end though, so was worth it.

A simple download link as seen on artic.edu would be appreciated but sadly I don't see Google providing this because they want people to remain on Google, logged in, while they view art.

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