What Does the Met’s New Online Collection Mean for Art Students?

Yeah, it means access for a lot of people who would otherwise, for many reasons, not have any access at all. Access, also, to many items that are not ordinarily on public display. It is true that seeing an art object as a physical object can enhance your understanding of it in a way that a photo of it doesn't, and I don't think that archives like this will replace that experience. But many can still benefit from it.

I spent a ton of time working with the Met's database to create this:

http://art-slideshow.net

They only made the public domain images downloadable + zoomable, about 204,000 (not sure where you got the 50k figure). Stuff from 1900+ is often still under copyright, so that's why most of them are low-res.

Of the 204k, I filtered out baseball cards and cigarette packages, leaving 193,525. Of these, 151,782 are what I considered high quality: 1800+ pixels width and/or height.

There are def tiny images in there like this...

http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ao/original/VS91_37_16...

...but really anything interesting to an art student has hella resolution.

All in all it's a pretty traditional, conservative collection -- Google's is great for newer and crazier stuff.

Ah, HN, where's there's always a comment that roughly reads "It's good, but [X] is better."

Snark aside, I wasn't aware of either of these before today, and I'm delighted that I now have hours and hours exploring them ahead of me. So thank you for the link to Google's project.

Oddly, despite the greater range of HQ works with Google, I'm finding their system significantly more frustrating to browse. One of my favourite things about art galleries is accidental discoveries - walking in for one thing, and wandering around for a while before accidentally finding something else amazing, that I'd never have thought to look for.

As one would expect from Google, their system is proving very helpful if I want to find a particular artist or a particular style - it's great for finding things when I know what I want. If I want to see just impressionists, great. If I want to see just Monet, great.

However, I'm actually finding I prefer just browsing through page after page of the Met's collection, precisely because it's not categorised and sorted to the nth degree.

Interestingly, I think it's representative of a broader problem that's creeping into society. Chance is an important element of discovery, and one that for some bizarre reason (or I suppose, for predictability of advertising), the Googles, Facebooks, etc of the world seem to be trying to eliminate. The focus on giving people what you (or an algorithm) think they want is what leads to things like echo chambers, through reduced exposure to different points of view.

What are you trying to accomplish by posting this?