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The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

nytimes.com

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Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#51
post #37
post #20

This is a real treat... I can see Van Gogh like this one http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ep/original/DT1567.jpg in such detail, without having to go to the museum. With my degrading eye sights, this might even be better than going to museum.

Am not someone who can claim to "get" art. Is there some description someplace that will help interpret the work of art - for the one you've linked to, for example?. A background of the context perhaps?

> Am not someone who can claim to "get" art

(All IMHO, and sorry if it states things you already know:) I 'get' art, and I'll say that 'getting' art is a misunderstood, over-emphasized concept. Find works that move you, that challenge your perspective. Who cares what everyone else thinks or likes? Find your art. Art is in the eye of the beholder; don't worry too much about the artist's intentions - they lost that control once they put it on paper - what does it mean to you, as it is right there at that moment? Art isn't some secret code that needs decoding; it is what it is, to you. Just to get your mind working on it; here are some questions to ask yourself and tips:

* How does it make you feel? To really grasp art, bring the emotional part of you to bear - it's more far effective than the rational side in this regard. Then try to articulate it (which ties in the rational side). If I can't seem to get traction then I just think 'how do I feel?' - not even how does the object in front of me make me feel, but just 'how am I feeling?' - and often, presto, everything comes into focus.

* Unlike real life, nothing in a work of art is accidental or gratuitous (unless it's intentionally that way!). Why is that red line there? What would a different red look like? A much thicker line? A less opaque one? Rotated 90 degrees? Or, why is it set on a sunny afternoon? What if it was cloudy? Nighttime? Moonlight and stars?

* Often the most powerful question: What are the assumptions behind image in front of you? What didn't they paint (or sculpt, etc.)? If it's a Renior of nudes by a stream, the painting assumes there is beauty in pink flesh, in nature, a relationship between those two things, and it assumes there is no shame in it, no danger, but something positive.

If a work of art makes me uncomfortable, that's a great starting point - what is making me uncomfortable? It's just an object; it can't do me any harm or do anything at all. Often the works that make me most uncomfortable at first - the ones I hate - are the ones that I love the most in the long run. The ones that bore me are the worst.

Reading a book on art history can help you understand a lot of the context behind and specific images in the art (X was a big issue at the time, or image Y represented something in that culture), but IMHO it is much more valuable to read later, to learn something that enhances your burgeoning art appreciation rather than to learn about something you aren't familiar with in the first place. Just find what you love.

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#52

It may seem obvious, but for those who haven't tried it: The effect of high-res great art on a high-res luminescent screen can be magical. It puts all those other desktop backgrounds to shame - instantly revealing how incredible some of these images are. Make one your desktop background.

I displayed the Hermitage painting collection on a secondary 30'' monitor, set to rotate at 5 minutes. A key factor was that I had the titles watermarked on the images otherwise I would have been frustrated to see something beautiful that I don't know the name of.

Had this setup for a couple of years, and watched lots of beautiful paintings. My purpose was to submerge my visual perception into art for a long time and just let my artistic perception develop organically.

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#53
post #52

It may seem obvious, but for those who haven't tried it: The effect of high-res great art on a high-res luminescent screen can be magical. It puts all those other desktop backgrounds to shame - instantly revealing how incredible some of these images are. Make one your desktop background.

I displayed the Hermitage painting collection on a secondary 30'' monitor, set to rotate at 5 minutes. A key factor was that I had the titles watermarked on the images otherwise I would have been frustrated to see something beautiful that I don't know the name of. Had this setup for a couple of years, and watched lots of beautiful paintings. My purpose was to submerge my visual perception into art for a long time and…

How did you get the watermarks. Programmatically and if so how. Or did they come that way

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#54
post #52

It may seem obvious, but for those who haven't tried it: The effect of high-res great art on a high-res luminescent screen can be magical. It puts all those other desktop backgrounds to shame - instantly revealing how incredible some of these images are. Make one your desktop background.

I displayed the Hermitage painting collection on a secondary 30'' monitor, set to rotate at 5 minutes. A key factor was that I had the titles watermarked on the images otherwise I would have been frustrated to see something beautiful that I don't know the name of. Had this setup for a couple of years, and watched lots of beautiful paintings. My purpose was to submerge my visual perception into art for a long time and…

[deleted]

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#55
post #17

Is there a torrent or dump of all the images? I wouldn't mind seeding / helping to keep an archive of all this. This is pretty great!

To scrape, start here http://metmuseum.org/api/collection/collectionlisting?offset... and increase 'offset' by 100. The JSON output contains image URLs. The total number of results is 441048, so finding another endpoint that doesn't enforce a limit of 100 on the 'perPage' argument would be great. --- EDIT: thanks to spitfare, I updated the perPage argument to 100. The site doesn't allow larger values, but that's defi…

If you finish scraping, can you still make a .torrent?

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#58
post #8

I'm curious about their reasoning for choosing Creative Commons Zero over the public domain. I'm fond of the public domain; I've released some of my software[0] into the public domain. Cynically, I think it's more fashionable and branded to license something CC0 than declare it public domain. Despite my cynicism, I like that they're doing this. The article says: > Enabled by the Museum's move to open access, we also…

CC0 is a legally formalised version of public domain, and this can be useful.

The partnerships are to get the word out and make the images readily available for use, so they do the job of spreading the works and publicising the works and the museum. Wikimedia blog post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/07/the-met-public-art-cre... tl;dr this is actually pretty awesome, and we have a Wikimedian In Residence there to help.

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#59

I've been looking for more CC0 resources as I've started doing more video editing. This is pretty awesome. Some other CC0 art/photo websites I've used a lot lately: https://pixabay.com/ https://unsplash.com/

I actually created a meta search engine for high quality cc0 photos, its called librestock. check it out :) http://librestock.com

Re: The Met Makes 375k Images Available for Free

#60
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I displayed the Hermitage painting collection on a secondary 30'' monitor, set to rotate at 5 minutes. A key factor was that I had the titles watermarked on the images otherwise I would have been frustrated to see something beautiful that I don't know the name of. Had this setup for a couple of years, and watched lots of beautiful paintings. My purpose was to submerge my visual perception into art for a long time and…

How did you get the watermarks. Programmatically and if so how. Or did they come that way

There's many ways to skin that cat - assuming Unix, immediate options include:

the images are stored locally, you have some mapping from filename to title, and you create new images with watermarks using ImageMagick in a bash script

or the images are hosted online, and you write a small C/Python/whatever code that gets the URLs and associated titles from the host, and then uses Imlib2 (maybe with some wrapper) to display the images with titles rendered as text composited on top

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