Screen shot of MoMA's "Starry Night" on Google's Art Project

Google has unveiled its latest culture grab: Art Project, a website with 1,061 high resolution artworks from a star studded cast of cooperating museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, London’s National Gallery, the Uffizi  and the Hermitage.

The world’s premier cultural custodians evidently put up less of a fuss than the book crowd, who protested Google’s widespread digitization of books with lawsuits (see here and here).

The art site offers 6,000 so-called “street view panoramas” akin to the visuals on Google maps and real estate websites. Over the past 18 months, the Google elves scanned high resolution images of museum masterpieces, plus 360-degree tours of individual galleries. One can only hope the museums requested a large fee in exchange for the rights to these images.

Each institution selected one work for “gigapixelation” a sort of mega magnification on the order of 7 billion pixels apiece. This allows for close-ups of brushstrokes and the like, superior to the human eye, according to Google. MoMA offered up The Starry Night for mega-pixelization.

Google’s website has a “Create an Artwork Collection” function, permitting users to save “views” of artworks into their own collection, which can then be shared.

Google’s art foray, coming on the heels of the online VIP art fair, offers up the possibility of art for a wider audience. The ultimate societal cost of all this technologically mediated artwork will be something worth keeping an eye on.