Google’s Arts and Culture App Brings the World’s Best Artwork to Your Phone

The Google Cultural Institute has launched Google Arts and Culture, a massive online database of art accessible via a smartphone app and a new website. The encyclopedic collection pulls from more than 1,000 museums across 70 countries, with works ranging from street art in Moscow to Renaissance masterpieces at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But Google Arts and Culture is much more than a repository of images (which, by the way, is searchable by subject, theme, time period, and many more criteria)—it offers a daily digest of notable events that happened on a given day, as well as roundups of unusual subjects in art, such as powerful men in heels. When combined with Google Cardboard, an affordable tool that transforms your smartphone into a virtual reality apparatus, the app lets users immerse themselves in museums or ancient sites around the world, providing 360-degree views. And to top it off, the app offers the Art Recognizer feature, in which users can identify works of art in a museum with their phone's camera (similar to Google’s reverse image search) and learn more about them. While this feature is available only at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, you can expect to see it offered in more institutions soon as the database grows. google.com