That’s what Jeff Jarvis recently titled a book about new strategies for achieving business success. The way the book was sold was brilliant: “Whatever you do, Google will end up doing it better than you and for free. Are you ready?” And he was right. Google is the company that has had the greatest growth in the shortest time in history. It is a brand whose management can serve as a case study of the changes brought about by the digital age. Although some of its proposals have met with reluctance (among them Street View or Google Analytics, banned in Germany for overstepping the boundaries of privacy), there is no doubt that we live in a Googleized world.
Google continues to make new launches and now it is the turn of GoogleArtProject, which offers a virtual tour of a selection of museums around the world. The project uses Street View technology that allows you to virtually move around the different spaces of the museums, get close and look at numerous works in detail, expand your knowledge through your own channel on YouTube and create your own collection that can be shared on social networks.
But what is really interesting are the premises and the details of the project. The objective and functions of GoogleArtProjects are not as clear as those of Google Maps, for example. It is very significant to analyze which museums are there. The list continues to grow, but as of today it has seventeen institutions: Alte Nationalgalerie (Berlin), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian (Washington DC), The Frick Collection (New York), Gemäldegalerie (Berlin), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), MOMA (New York), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Museum Kampa (Prague), National Gallery (London), Palais de Versailles, Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), The State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg), Tate Britain (London), Galleria degli Uffici (Florence) and Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam).
The tours proposed are also interesting, since they are not curated, but the museums themselves decide which works to show based on their own interests. So it is not unusual to find some works “blurred” due to copyright issues.
Google is not the first to offer virtual tours of museums. ArtBasel and Frieze have had specific iPhone applications for some time now, and recently VipArtFair was held, a virtual fair where you could take a much more organized (and concentrated) tour than at the in-person fairs, with the curiosity that gallery owners could keep track of their visitors and delve into the interest shown by the users’ clicks. But does Google do it better and also for free? In this case, surely not, but the interesting thing is to ask: what is Google’s interest in embarking on such a complex superproduction? Is it a declaration of principles to stop other similar initiatives that require payment?
[Article published in Bonart, 2011]
