Google Art Project puts museums on street view, creates virtual Rothkos

• http://clatl.com/atlanta/ImageArchives?by=1223504
• Check out that Rothko on the right. Oh. Wait. Nevermind.

The latest project from the folks at Google (aside from rigging up Twitter access for the folks in Egypt) gives you access to the halls of museums from around the world. Feel like checking out the "Victorian Spectacle" room in The Tate Britain? Take a gander. Have you always wanted to walk the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles? You can kind of do that. Curious about the permanent collection at Museum Kampa in Prague? Apparently, it is pretty great.

In practice, the experience of virtually strolling through museums has many of the same pleasures (and problems) as using Google Maps Street View. You can instantly be thousands of miles away, looking at a Van Gogh alongside a Rousseau alongside a Gauguin, and decide that you'd like to take a closer look at the brush strokes on "The Starry Night." Thanks to "gigapixel" technology, a closer look can take you all the way to a microscopic view of hairline fractures in the paint. When something catches your eye across the room, though, you might try to slide over in a rush of choppy, morphing 3D vectors only to feel like your virtual neck is stuck in the wrong virtual position and you can only look at the damn virtual painting at some cockeyed angle.

That problem aside, the project is off to an admirable start, including works from 17 museums in 9 countries. The online collections are heavy on older works that (presumably) have less copyright issues than contemporary work. Some museums, like MoMA, only have a single gallery available right now, while others seem to have opened up a large portion of their collections. In the case of rooms where a single work hasn't been cleared for the project, Google has either blurred out the painting (just like those houses in Germany) or replaced them with work by Mark Rothko. We can't tell exactly which. You can find our more at Google Art Project.