This is probably one of the best things I've seen posted in HN. Art books, aside from the actual art, contain essays written by academics or experts not found in Wikipedia or similar. They're also printed in small amounts and fairly expensive (e.g. books on exhibitions are $50-70). This kind of project opens up a lot of knowledge to the general public. Now if we could get more Kenneth Clark books reprinted...
Totally agree - the essays/papers/artist ephemera in most of these books are impossible to find and rarely reprinted. I've always found it strange that looking at art is pretty common but reading/talking about art in a critical way is seen as too academic/inaccessible for most people. I hope that by putting this stuff into the public domain more people get excited about Art History - it's a super interesting field th…
But then there's tags (at least in MFAH) that were obviously written by someone else and are completely subjective. My favorite one to lambast is just a painting of a black square on a white background, and the description is a 400 word essay about how the work "challenges the boundaries of man" and other phrases that to me are nonsense.
I get that it's easy to pick on Modern Art but I feel sticking to the objective is still possible in that field.