Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

openculture.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 93 posts

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

#11

Post by wjn0 »

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…

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but based on your comment, I can only guess you're fortunate to have access to "great" art.

For people who don't live close to huge cities with big museums, the diversity and availability of art could be very low. Digitizing art and making it publicly available is a step forward for those people.

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

#12

Post by robin_reala »

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 attribution).

It’s important for me as I need PD (or CC0, which is functionally equivalent) to pick decent cover art for Standard Ebooks[4] works. As it is we usually spend hours hunting through pre-1923 art books on Hathi for the perfect piece, and CC0 collections make that much much easier.

[1] https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/

[2] https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

[3] http://munch.emuseum.com/

[4] https://standardebooks.org/

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

#13

Post by protonimitate »

olavk wrote: post #8
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…

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…

Fair enough.

To be honest, I have issues with the Museum/Gallery institution as it exists, but that's another story altogether.

My bigger point, which maybe wasn't clear from my post, is that Art is one of the greatest ways to express humanity, and by digitizing and industrializing, we will lose some of that human aspect.

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

Agreed. And I don't think that we should idolize the great works as much as we do. I strongly encourage a more local appreciation for artists who are currently creating ;)

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

#14

Post by ArcticCelt »

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?

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

#15

Post by jay-anderson »

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…

Agreed. It's annoying that we need special permissions on old public domain artwork. Depending on where you're at they can't prevent you from using it freely. In the US at least there is precedent that exact digital copies of public domain works are not able to receive copyright protection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...). Though this isn't universal throughout the world (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/07/25/wikimedia-sweden-freed...).

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

#16

Post by rococode »

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?

We scraped the site. The website takes a pagesize parameter that doesn't seem to have a limit so we loaded all the images in one page and just downloaded them all.

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

#18

Post by robin_reala »

jay-anderson wrote: post #15
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…

Agreed. It's annoying that we need special permissions on old public domain artwork. Depending on where you're at they can't prevent you from using it freely. In the US at least there is precedent that exact digital copies of public domain works are not able to receive copyright protection ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel... ). Though this isn't universal throughout the world ( https://b…

SE’s decided that that isn’t enough unfortunately, so we go for pre-1923 publication in the US in a book or magazine as our yardstick. Better to be absolutely certain if you’re releasing a subsequent work into PD.

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

#19

Post by jacquesm »

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…

What would you give to have the Library of Alexandria back in digitized form?

Think of it as a backup, rather than a replacement or a dilution.

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

#20

Post by codingdave »

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…

I agree that seeing a work in real life is better. But sub-optimal viewing of art is better that no viewing of art, and many art students have learned their art history via books and slides even before digitized art was a thing.

As far as the contemporary scene, it will change and evolve, as it always does. It you don't like the current trends, start something new. After all, the last hundred years have seen a decent collection of deliberate art movements where a group of people consciously came together to make statements with their arts and acts. There is no reason to let digital trends stop that.

Post reply on HN