Google Art Project 2 launched this morning at Musée d'Orsay. There were dozens of museum colleagues waiting for their institution to show up on screen for this photo op. It was kind of hilarious.

Google launched the second round of the Project this morning at the Musée d’Orsay giving the press and museum reps a tour of what’s new. Last year, Art Project was launched with 17 museums in 9 countries, 400 artists and 1000 works of art.  In round two, the project has grown to include 151 museums in 40 countries with 6000 artists and 32,000 works. Interestingly, only 20 of the museums are in the United States, so what’s in the Art Project now is much more representative of the international museum scene.  There are a couple of really interesting features—you can search across institutions, you can filter by medium and you can create your own collection.

Collection objects from the Brooklyn Museum in Google Art Project.

Our contribution consists of images from almost 1000 collection objects; for launch we selected objects that were currently on view at the Museum, were clear of copyright issues and had publication quality images.  To get them to Google, our API was used to fetch the data (thanks, Piotr) and was paired with images that Deb Wythe grabbed from our Digital Asset Management System. Having both systems in place allowed us to join the Art Project less than a month ago and get a sizable amount of data there very quickly.

It was sort of interesting to watch the slides during Google’s presentation this morning.  As I sat there, up popped our Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington and I snagged a photo thinking, “that’s ours!”

Is this the Brooklyn Museum portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart...or...?

I started wondering if it really was the Brooklyn Museum version of that painting…Gilbert Stuart was known for painting George Washington quite a bit and our own text on the web and in-gallery says as much.  Sure enough, a quick search in Google Art Project revealed three similar versions—one from the National Portrait Gallery, one from The White House and our own.  Now you can see them all together—at least together online—and that’s one of the great things about Art Project’s expansion.

A search for Gilbert Stuart in Google Art Project shows similar works side by side.

Go explore and see what you find.

In the new realism that typified American art of the decade, liberated modern bodies resonate with classical ideals, the teeming modern city is rendered empty and silent, and still life is pared to an essentialized clarity.

In creating an in-gallery interactive, the challenge was finding an activity that would highlight the disparity between what we’ve come to associate with decade and the idealized vision created by its artists.

What did the Jazz Age look like? Interactive asks visitors to make their own selection from an array of popular photographs to see how it compares to the imagery created by the American artists featured in Youth and Beauty.

The resulting interactive uses the Google Images API as a way to show what’s in the popular imagination of four themes related to the show. A visitor searches for imagery on a theme and is asked to select an image from Google’s results; the selected image is displayed along side a related work from the exhibition and the interactive explores how the popular imagery delivered via Google differs from the artists’ depiction.

Youth and Beauty interactive utilizes the Google Images API and runs on iPads embedded into a popular culture timeline.

Given this is a live search, the results are not always perfectly accurate to the time period, but they are pretty close.  We’ve also tweaked it a bit to help the results gain a little more accuracy; turning on Google’s “safe search” and displaying only black and white imagery. The interactive runs on four iPads in the gallery where the devices are embedded into a popular culture timeline in the exhibition. You can also play with it on the web.

But wait! Before you start kicking yourself for signing up with us before we released this super-awesome feature, let me tell you this: we have carefully engineered a solution to your problem. If you login with your existing username and password, then navigate to your account page, you will see a link to transition your account to use Google ID.

Also, if for some reason you come to an impasse with Google and would like to start using another emails address and password to log into our site, you can easily transition to using any other account you choose.

Jeffrey mentioned a collaboration that they were just about to release. It’s been hard to keep this a secret and when you see what they’ve cooked up with you’ll see why. Artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsleyn worked with Google Street View to stage a community performance right outside the Mattress Factory’s home of Sampsonia Way. MF has posted a “making of” on YouTube and Jeffrey has more about the project on the MF blog.

I have to stop gushing about the MF now, but I’ll say one last thing: the place is spectacular in real life too, so check out Street View and be sure to go in person if you are in Steel City!