Louvre makes its entire collection available online
collections.louvre.fr
collections.louvre.fr
https://www.youtube.com/user/PetersenMuseum/videos
The Seattle flight museum also started a series where the main curator would talk about individual planes in long format, way better experience than looking at photos online.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCda1wjNf7JaYgx9ukXRqgIQ
Those are just the ones I noticed as an Aviation and Automobile enthusiast. If anyone knows others please share ;_;
https://github.com/sofixa/awesome-museums-online
Tomorrow/early next week I'll throw in the boilerplate ( contributing.md, PR template, and see about organisation/generation/TOC/etc.) and then i'll start adding the mentions from this thread and others i know of.
Once it's decent and ready for wide contributions, i'll post on HN, Reddit and co.
https://www.kevan.tv/articles/the-best-sites-for-public-doma...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBAEOsdxIbLPFEomzphaZ...
https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2020/04/16/things-to-do-...
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/163309-REG/Kodak_1907...
And maybe some meta data about the camera and settings.
I don't recall any online collections using targets. Surely these curation and archivist domain experts record this stuff. I've casually asked a few times, but no leads.
--
My partner likes to create master copies. Portrait, still life.
I've ordered fine art prints of dozens of originals. Always frustrating. I just get one of every option (matte, gloss, each type of medium). And let my partner pick the one that seems to match most closely. (Then I give away the extras as 'just because' gifts, which people seem to like.)
You can also request free high-res TIFF files with colour reference for professional use. To order TIFF files, please fill in the form below.
Nice. Hopefully this becomes the norm.
Just one anecdote: During a VIP tour of a museum, eg browsing the warehouse of stuff not on display, I asked about digital archiving. Blank looks. I'm guessing it's just not part of the curriculum for minting new archivists, curators, historians. I hope I'm wrong. Surely the younger cohorts know this stuff...?
they definitely have color-calibrated images, but not for the public
edit: for those unaware, in the US, reproductions/photos of public domain 2D art are themselves public domain and not subject to copyright
There's a modest niche opportunity for a high end print shop to just handle it. White label the service so museums can reskin, rebrand, integrate.
I pitched the notion to the two local shops I use (high end, preferred by artists). Build relations with some museums, create a simple e-commerce site. No interest. I get it; Print is a dying industry and the old farts are just holding on until retirement.
I'm happy to pay real money for real prints. I hate fussing with this stuff and being responsible for the results. While I wrote software for print production manufacturing, I never touched the color calibration stuff. I'm just not temperamentally suited for that kind of work.
FWIW, the best source of true color images, for doing master copies, have been art coffee books from the 80s and 90s. When the print industry was basically printing money, some publishers took quality seriously.
Maybe, or maybe not. In my experience, a lot of print shops, especially the chains, won't touch paintings for fear of liability, copyright or otherwise.
I tried to get one of my wife's paintings scanned and printed in a major American city, in order to send the print to her mother for Christmas. I must have gone to at least 30 places over two or three months, and none of them would touch it because there was no way to prove ownership. They wouldn't take our word for it. Some wanted paperwork from a lawyer.
I ended up taking it to a friend who is an architect, and he had it done in his office.
You should ask for your money back.
More seriously, I first browsed the textile & inscription images, guessing they'd most likely have color targets.
https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010000055
As you can see, they do have scales (of course).
I know nothing about archiving, archeology, history. I'm just guessing that color calibration would be crucial to their studies.
I think you can infer white balance from those scales. And because they're two toned, maybe some of the gamut too?
Not using a proper color target just seems like a missed opportunity.
Has anyone ever raised copyright concerns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclée
We just tried all the local ones we could find. Then did repeat business with the one who was easiest to work with, did the best job.
[1] https://creativecommons.org/2020/01/10/paris-musees-releases...
So my understanding is that it is the photographs of those works that are copyrighted. In my view it goes against the spirit of public domain to use this in order to restrict the use of the collections put online.
However, I think the laws for this vary quite a bit across countries, and in many countries the photograph is considered a new copyright work. In general it's pretty frustrating how many legal barriers there are to accessing and reusing old works of art. Thankfully a growing number of museums have made things easy with clear copyright releases (Rijksmuseum, Paris Musées, the MET), but others seem more interested in preserving their ability to sell prints.
The downloading and re-use of medium-format photographs published on the collections website representing works that are not protected by copyright (hereinafter called the “Photographs”) are permitted, free of charge, for any non-collective use within a strictly private context and for the following exhaustively-listed museographic, scientific and educational purposes: - projection and distribution for the purpose of museographic, pedagogic and scientific activities, such as their reproduction on labels and exhibition signs, the presentation of guided tours, the running of educational workshops, the delivery of teaching and training sessions and the holding of symposia and seminars; - publication of exhibition and permanent collection catalogues, scientific papers and Ph.D. theses for publishers whose registered office is in the European Union, within a limit of one thousand five hundred (1500) copies, republication included: - digital scientific and educational publications.
It is more permisive than I expected it would be, frankly.
Does anybody know how World War II affected ownership in this case, considering by the time Louis XIV [edited, thanks julienchastang] died (1715) the painting was already in the Palace of Versailles? [2]
According to https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/mnr/MNR00265 its last known owner was Friedrich Welz, an Austrian gallery owner, so the work must have come to Paris postwar to figure out whether it needed to be restituted to a previous owner.
The original Joconde is https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010062370
https://www.artcuriouspodcast.com/artcuriouspodcast/1
It's underwhelming in real life, very small, dimly lit, under thick glass, teeming with tourists.
Online art is a great endeavor but there's no context for art without the space in which it lives, and in this I think the Musée d'Orsay is the better space.
Interesting - I tend to think of context in terms of things like social, cultural, or historical context rather than the physical space.
Potentially online museums and galleries can provide a lot more historical context than a physical museums could, not only by providing supporting information but also by including many works that would not necessarily be located in the same physical museums.
But I'm intrigued by the physical space issue - perhaps using 3D graphics, VR, and AR could help virtual gallery attendees to gain a better spacial understanding of the work as well as how it is displayed in the physical museum.
In terms of current social, cultural, and historical context, I think virtual galleries can certainly present works in the context of current culture and recent history, and I also wonder if there are effective ways to provide a shared experience of visiting a gallery with other people, including people that you know as well as random members of the public, much as you might have in a physical gallery or museum.
When the name of the copyist isn't known, it's common to file the copy under the name of the original artist – and with the “d'après” at the end not to break the alphabetical order.
There's nothing on Wikipedia suggesting that, based on a skim, it says:
>It had been believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506; however, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic itself, on permanent display at the Louvre, Paris since 1797.[10] //
I'm guessing I've misunderstood??
The OP posts saying ~'why does _the_ Mona Lisa image say this' and then the responder doesn't explicitly correct them: the linked image is not _the_ one but one of the copies, a copy that's also in the Louvre collection.
Aside, Wikipedia says it's been "on permanent display" in the Louvre since Louis XIV; not quite right, perhaps they meant part of the permanent collection.
I'm interested that Wikipedia claims it had no special renown until pretty recently, yet there are several high quality copies. Is that consistent?
Edit: Van Gogh collection: https://vangoghworldwide.org
There is the OpenGLAM Survey, a list of Galleres, Libraries, Archives, and Museum sharing their collections under open licenses: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yc8z0z7XdhVKvhTbD2_z...
Then there are also aggregators like dp.la, cultural.jp, digitalnz.org, europeana.eu etc that might also be of interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love
> Server error. Continue to search the Louvre collections
[0] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/03/26/rusher-nfts
after all if I wanted to buy a Jack Dorsey signature tweet for two million dollars or a Beeple collage for 70 million I'm sure Beeple would have gladly put it on a usb stick, signed me a card, printed it billboard sized and driven it to my house while taking me out for a steak dinner
It's absolutely nebulous what the 'digital' part adds.
Additionally, I’ve read that the supposed $69 million dollars worth of ethereum used to purchase that famous NFT isn’t actually a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. So there’s a good chance this whole thing was a farce to jumpstart interest in the NFT market itself.
Ultimately a few whales, famous people, and early adopters have already made out like bandits while the vast majority of people are barely going to make any money in the NFT market and it will sizzle out rapidly.
Let's say I want to send you money for something illegal. You, however, don't want the government getting suspicious about how you're spending $large_amount on $small_salary.
I could gift you the money, but if we don't have an existing relationship or reason to do so that looks mighty suspicious, and additionally gift tax can end up being more than income tax.
The next option is for me to "buy" something from you. This needs to be something you can obtain for a low price but sell for a high price. You could sell me a loaf of bread for $1million, but that's going to look equally (if not more) suspicious than the gift.
Enter art: Art can be produced for extremely low cost, but sold at massive markups (and often is so). The value of art is almost entirely subjective (i.e. "what is someone willing to pay for this"), so unlike with a piece of bread it's not obvious that I'm paying for something I consider near worthless. Each piece of original artwork is unique, so there's no market to prove that nobody else would be willing to pay such a sum for your art.
Therefore, with art you can receive the money, pay taxes on it, and claim to the government it's totally legit. NFTs have similar properties to art: they're unique, can be minted at very low cost, people are willing to pay large sums for them, and nobody really has any way of determining their "true" value.
And there is almost certainly a large real world contingent salivating at the thought that they can soon launder huge amounts of money, based on infinite products, that are impossible to value and trivial to create.
And as usual there will be a handful of technology people afterwards standing around shocked, saying they had no idea they enabled the 21st century's money laundering platform, and
Just like the cliche "I just wanted to make an anarchist digital currency, I didn't think it would impact society in negative ways we can't control!"
With an NFT, Jack just has to say that this one NFT is the original. Every subsequent transaction can verify the NFT's validity just using math.
Also as a sidenote, you have actually no idea whether this particular blockchain will still be around in the future. In fact given the volatility of tech that's not really that likely to be honest.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artist...
It's fairly easy to verify the origins of statements here, especially since Jack is on Twitter announcing his NFT on his timeline. What more than that do you need?
Same as you verify any celebrities selling movie props on ebay or whatever, if they haven't announced the sale via some other channel where they are already verified, don't trust that it's the real deal in the marketplace.
> Which is why the Beeple NFT sale didn't happen somewhere in the nether of the internet, but through Christie's, a 300 year old seller of art, after buyer and seller had communicated personally.
This is a feature, not a drawback. You can make the sale however you want, via bank transfer, cash in hand or actually transfer Eth to a wallet. What matters in the end is who stands as the owner in the blockchain, but how it gets there, is irrelevant.
> Also as a sidenote, you have actually no idea whether this particular blockchain will still be around in the future. In fact given the volatility of tech that's not really that likely to be honest.
This is a separate issue from NFTs and applies to the whole cryptocurrency space. For now, the $1.5 trillion market is disagreeing with you that it can disappear in the future, as otherwise people wouldn't put so much money into the ecosystem.
Now you rely on a tweet being durable. The entire blockchain history is based on something not on the blockchain that can be edited by people with root at Twitter.
The trust layer is in the physical world either based on hearsay or a physical contract with two parties. In any case, it's off-chain.
That's a bigger issue than Jack being able to sell it multiple times.
Just as it's not the same if a random person tries to sell movie props from famous movies, compared to if the person actually being in that production in the first place.
Jack's tweet doesn't become counterfeit if Hjfrf sells it, it's non-figuratively and verifiably the same exact tweet.
In an age of trivial copying, editing, recompressing, and other alterations, “original” can get lost. This gives means to identify, transfer, and prove originality.
People imho buy the "uniqueness" of an item. This is why a poster of "the Kiss" by Klimt costs $10 and the original costs a $gazillion. The article mentions an autograph of Lennon. Not just any autograph, but one on the day he died. That means "no more after that". Maybe one will resurface, but
A friend who is a painter was telling me that one of the reasons painters become famous after death is because they don't dilute the value of their works by creating more. Imagine they paint one bridge, and it is great! Someone buys it for $10k. Then they go ahead and paint 50 more bridges. Now they will sell for 2k. So the $10k-buyer just got screwed. And we don't know if one day thay paint 50 more bridges, or that was it (dilution ends).
Now, she could be a bit bitter because she wasn't selling as high as she would wish, but she does make a good point.
It's kinda like playing all the notes from a Mozart piece in a random order, you could argue all the ingredients are there, but it won't be a masterpiece.
People are delusional, they want all the fame and rewards while putting less and less effort in their craft, if we can even call that a craft anymore, I mean, look at that shit: https://opensea.io/collection/the-anime-girls
Huh? Isn't it obvious? They exist because some people have more money than sense.
>including Apple’s unofficial PR department John Gruber
Edgy. Do you also spell that Seattle-based OS company with a dollar sign for the S?
Money laundering.
The Louvre can still NFT all the images as they please at millions for each one. If anything, it makes it easier now that people can start valuing the items before deciding to make a 'purchase' vs the museum starting auctions immediately.
> We’re sprinting towards March 2021. Immutable X alpha release is still expected in March 2021 for Gods Unchained, and coming to other partner games and marketplaces soon after.
If that's true, I will be more than happy to retract my statement. But I think I have little to worry about.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a35500985/who-is-beepl...
If the money goes to some random person who has managed to with the largess of the rich person lottery, instead of down the drain... it's different.
If that doesn't make sense to you, you have not understood what money is!
There are more productive ways to deal with wealth inequality.
In my experience, that doesn't serve one well.
Generally interfering with social processes through top-down cookie cutter measures leads to negative unintended consequences, because the rationale behind said intervention is based on an overly simplistic understanding of a highly complex system.
> Generally interfering with social processes through top-down cookie cutter measures leads to negative unintended consequences, because the rationale behind said intervention is based on an overly simplistic understanding of a highly complex system.
If my understanding of the system seems highly simplistic, it may be because I wrote an HN comment two sentences long as opposed to a book.
For example, there is a very strong negative correlation between government spending, as a percentage of GDP, and economic growth:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821004405/http://ime.bg/upl...
And no markets will not "stop working". They'll work less effectively.
>>If my understanding of the system seems highly simplistic, it may be because I wrote an HN comment two sentences long as opposed to a book.
Every one's understanding of nation/global scale systems is overly simplistic, which is why it's impossible to predict what the market will do. In the absence of near-perfect knowedge, it's better to not interfere with spontaneously emergent bottom-up phenomena, like prices, or the market, via far-reaching cookie cutter rules.
EDIT:
With respect to below, I can't respond with a new comment due to comment rate-limiting, so I'll respond here:
It's not an opinion. They show the data, from 81 countries, over a span of decades, and show a pervasive correlation. The evidence speaks for itself.
This liberal think tank was instituted in a country that experienced 50 years of central economic planning, based on economically illiterate left-wing conspiracy-theories/economic-fallacies, so maybe they have legitimate cause to promote markets.
But go ahead and look down on them with your snarky derision.
>>Not really? There are other countries than the US which have had a significantly larger government (as well as higher taxes), or so called mixed-economies, that did just fine or even great?
Which countries? The data shows a strong negative correlation between government size and economic growth, within a dataset of 81 countries.
Look at Europe: the rise of social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP since the mid 1960s corresponded with stagnation in productivity and wage growth, just like occurred in the US.
>>As a side point, there's a discussion to be had regarding economic growth and GDP.
Per capita GDP growth, i.e. rising productivity, is the primary cause of improvements in quality of life. If ever you've lived in a country with low per capita GDP, and seen how ordinary people have to struggle so much more to afford to meet basic needs, you'd see why.
It's absolutely not the only factor impacting quality of life, it's true. GDP statistics are also not a perfect measure of productivity. But it's a very very good measure, of a very important contributor to quality of life, and if a particular way of organizing an economy is associated with this measure increasing at a slower rate, that is extremely important.
Economic growth rates, over longer periods of time, have a massive impact, because they have an exponential effect. A country with a per capita GDP growth rate of 4% will see double the income growth of a country with a per capita GDP growth rate of 2%, after only 35 years.
EDIT 2:
>>Which countries would you pick yourself as counter-evidence?
Norway, but it discovered oil in the 1970s, and was one of the top oil exporters in the world for decades with a population of only 4.5 million.
But anecdotes are not as important as large datasets, and large datasets show a strong correlation between small government (relative to GDP) and high economic growth rates.
>>feigned care of the poor
It's always good to assume that the person you're interacting with might be debating in good faith, and know things you don't. But I agree with the rest of that statement: it's anecdotal, just like the counter-examples you're searching for.
>>A GDP growth of 2-3% per year is also deeply unsustainable, doubling the economy every few decades can't continue.
It is sustainable for many many decades to come given returns from rising efficiency, and harvesting resources outside of earth, which are several orders of magnitude more plentiful than resources available on Earth.
Your pessimistic outlook reminds me of this:
"It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution"
-John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848, said at a time when the per capita GDP of the UK was the same as Kenya's today, i.e. 20X less.
Not really? There are other countries than the US which have had a significantly larger government (as well as higher taxes), or so called mixed-economies, that did just fine or even great?
It seems rather bad faith to omit such glaring examples when trying to prove a point.
As a side point, there's a discussion to be had regarding economic growth and GDP. Those measurements don't measure the well-being of a society, just economic activity. So we have countries with much lower GDP per capita but much also happier.
> Which countries?
Which countries would you pick yourself as counter-evidence?
> If ever you've lived in a country with low per capita GDP, and seen how ordinary people have to struggle so much more to afford to meet basic needs, you'd see why.
Alright, that just an anecdote with some added feigned care of the poor. It's already clear that this won't go anywhere.
> But it's a very very good measure
It's not, and that was acknowledged by even the "inventor" himself.
A GDP growth of 2-3% per year is also deeply unsustainable, doubling the economy every few decades can't continue.
Update 2:
> Norway
> But anecdotes are not as important as large datasets, and large datasets show a strong correlation between small government (relative to GDP) and high economic growth rates.
Hmm? A statement saying that a large government (and likely high taxes) inherently causes a bad outcome doesn't need a long-term graph to be falsified. Scandinavia is sufficient, even much of western Europe on top of that.
>>>feigned care of the poor
>> It's always good to assume that the person you're interacting with might be debating in good faith, and know things you don't.
Just saying that The Free Market believers aren't famous for their concern for the poor or inequality, so it sounds pretty false given both your link to "Institute for Market Economics" and your comment history:
> "the alliance between rent-seeking labor unions and the Democratic Party"
> "when the US was still a free market where people had a sacred right to freely contract."
> "How is the freedom to engage in profit-motived activity exploitation? The whole principle behind the free market is that all interactions have to be mutually voluntary in order to be legal."
The latter is the most obvious example of not caring for the outcomes of the Free Market on the poor.
The bad outcome is a country doing worse than they otherwise would have. You can never prove that happened, because you can't run the experiment twice, so you try to find evidence to make a reasonable case for/against it, as the next best thing.
One way to do that is to look at large datasets, to see what the general effect of the policy seems to be when the experiment is run multiple times on varying countries. The size of the dataset helps to minimize the impact of other factors, given that those factors should average out as the dataset gets larger, thus hopefully exposing the impact of the factor under study.
In any case, Scandinavian countries saw stagnation in their rate of wage/economic growth after adopting social democracy, so they are not a counter-example.
The reason Scandinavia and more generally, Western Europe, are prosperous today is because they were the most free-market-based economies in the world for the longest period of time. Their lead over the rest of the world has shrunk since the 1960s, when they started to massively deviate from their adherence to the free-market rule set.
>>Just saying that The Free Market believers aren't famous for their concern for the poor
That characterization is nothing more than an effective smear job by rent-seeking insiders that depend on the state's suppression of people's private property and contracting rights for their privileges - like unionized workers - and left-wing populists.
>>The latter is the most obvious example of not caring for the outcomes of the Free Market on the poor.
You assume that because you assume profit-motivated activity, free markets, contract rights, and opposition to the Democratic Party, are all harmful to the poor. This assumption is deeply mistaken.
EDIT:
Responding to below:
I throw that advice back at you.
Sweden is typical of Scandinavia. Sweden had the third highest per capita GDP in the world in 1968. By 1991, after two decades of rapidly expanding social welfare programs, it had fallen to 17th in the rankings:
http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...
Until the 1960s, Sweden had both been one of the most free market economies in the world, and most rapidly growing economies in the world, for around a century.
Update:
> I throw that advice back at you.
You're wildly extrapolating using the already established bad measurement of GDP. Do you believe that social democracies primary concern is increasing GDP per capita? Have the living standards been significantly worse in Scandinavia? No, the opposite.
Economic growth is not an end in itself, it's also not an indication for how well off he people in Scandinavia are compared to others. It's indisputable that the average Scandinavian citizen has enjoyed very high living standard for the last 80 years or so. Even with very large public sector and high taxes. This blatantly disproves the notion that this is not possible as you suggested above.
GDP is not a bad measure..
I think you're getting overly emotional, and not assessing my points rationally. For example, these counter-examples are not on-point:
>>Do you believe that social democracies primary concern is increasing GDP per capita?
I already argued why they should be: increases in per capita productivity are the primary source of improvements in quality of life.
For example, the reason the Scandinavian region had the highest quality of life in the world by the 1960s, when it had yet to create expansive social programs, is that in the preceding century, it had been the fastest growing economy in the world, with the most free market policies:
http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...
• Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.
• Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes.
Hong Kong and Singapore, the two most free market jurisdictions in the world over the last several decades, have caught up to and surpassed Scandinavia in key measures of quality of life, like life expectancy, despite being far behind them in 1960.
Economic development is the primary source of quality of life gains.
>>Have the living standards been significantly worse in Scandinavia? No, the opposite.
Absolute strawman, that really shows no grasp of what my argument is.
>>It's indisputable that the average Scandinavian citizen has enjoyed very high living standard for the last 80 years or so. Even with very large public sector and high taxes. This blatantly disproves the notion that this is not possible as you suggested above.
I never said it is not possible, so that is a strawman. I said that the rate at which the economy, and with it, quality of life, improves, slows down with marginal increases in the suppression of market rights via top-down regulatory impositions and taxes.
And once again, this is demonstrated by the fact that the more free-market based Hong Kong and Singapore closed a massive economic and quality of life gap with Scandinavian countries since the 1960s, and even surpassed them in some metrics, like life expectancy.
The $1000 iPhone app [2008] https://kottke.org/08/08/the-1000-iphone-app
https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl020579933
MOMA on the other hand has very high quality imagery of Durer.
Am I missing something or is it just a bunch of medium-res photos?
Personally I'm really not a fan of using the "century" notation, and in my native language it's never used.
So how do you handle fuzzy dates? What language is it, if I may ask?
Just for the record, I'm not saying this is a feature of Swedish specifically. I'm sure there are other languages that do the same.
Sketchfab has a recent blog-post on their part: https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/1-year-of-public-domai...
Or perhaps they are just worried about forgeries or unauthorised replicas?
This is the part where we all laugh and the credits roll out
Someone not knowing the two can't make the connection. Can AI?
That just tickled me.
Besides the food, the other highlight was https://www.centrepompidou.fr/ Easily my favourite hideous building, somehow I love it. Fascinating works and a great view from the rooftop patio.
This is very frustrating.
EDIT: And apparently selecting an artist from the filter list doesn't do anything but refresh the page. This is the worst. website. ever.
I believe this amulet is upside down and represents a cat curled up.
See if you can spot it.
https://collections.louvre.fr/en/recherche?typology%5B0%5D=5
After leaving one could browse through some of the collections and listen to the descriptions.
I’m glad everyone can check these out now.
Dubious opinion
>Rightful owners
All long dead
First of all "Rightful inheritance" is a matter of human law not natural law. Whatever state or laws existed surrounding inheritance clearly do not exist anymore for artifacts more than a few hundred years old. It is absurd to say property rights of states existing thousands of years ago apply today. You won't find any courts arguing that. Absurd.
Second, descendants of millennia old property owners are both impossible, and too easy to find. Because of the way human genetics works you yourself may be a descendant. I'm a descendant of 13th century nobility, does that mean I and the millions of others with this ancestry inherit their various artifacts such as a cup or textile? Absurd.
>If your property may end up in a foreign museum millennia after you die, why even bother working?
I don't know. You'd have to decide that for yourself. To me the question is absurd. When I die I may will what is left of my estate, but I don't absurdly believe that thousands of years later my will be respected. Totally ridiculous.
These artifacts belong to the world. Any attempts by states to force other states or organizations to "return stolen items" is a mealy mouthed way of saying they want the value they perceive they have lost. This is absurd greed. Just like conquering land, the losers have no right to their lost land. That is never the case. And you will never see these same states trying to return the land they have "stolen" to the descendants thousands of years later, now spread myriad around the world, because it's fucking absurd.
When people die and a lot of time passes things become just things. Some novel state that has no true connection to, and in fact had no knowledge of, some past state has no right to property of millennia-dead people of that state. It's ridiculous.
If this was about doing the right thing then one would recognize that these are artifacts of our shared human heritage, and as such they should be kept in trust for the benefit for all humanity unbound to any particular regime cultural or legal. Of course it isn't about doing the right thing it's about stupid politics.
Thanks for the reminder that not everyone has gone nuts.
https://news.softpedia.com/news/did-you-know-bill-gates-boug...
Rant: I have much more respect to that than the modern NFT craze. He didn't have any obligation to make them free to the public.
I tried exporting all the paintings and got a file with about 10,000 lines of this kind of content:
cl010055411;"Une Négresse portée par deux maures";"Desportes, Alexandre-François ; France";"1600 / 1700 (XVIIe siècle)";"INV 3891; B 1739";"Département des Peintures"
cl010052671;"Sainte Famille";"Girolamo del Pacchia ; Italie";"1500 / 1600 (XVIe siècle)";"MNR 827; D 55-7-2";"Département des Peintures"
cl010052673;Cavalier;"Anonyme ; Italie";"1400 / 1500 (XVe siècle)";"MNR 761";"Département des Peintures"
That first number is the catalog number which can dropped into a URL:
https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010055411
Some photos don't seem to exist (like the one above). Should be fairly easy to use curl and a script to pull a copy of the photos and display them though. Possibly they would get upset about someone using a bot to copy/view their entire photo collection, though maybe not if it only downloaded one photo every 5-30 minutes. If lots of people started doing this and didn't save the files locally their bandwidth use could go through the roof. A tag on the end will make the photo fullscreen in a web browser:
https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010208581#full...
So a Javascript app might work well, though it would be nice to fill the computer screen rather than the browser window frame. Maybe I'll write an app and send it to them if I get inspired. Not high on my priority list, but doesn't seem too difficult.
If many people opt to look at the works online and not in person, the Louvre can reduce the ticket prices without increasing the number of visitors and this would be considered a _success_.
So this is an actual thing. Lol.
And yeah Paris has its nice areas but like most cities in the world it's also overcrowded (try the RER A at rush hour - pre corona), dirty, has its dark sides, and is suffering greatly from mass-tourism. Most Parisians I know are not very happy. I go there a lot.
Really I think there's much better places to visit, like Barcelona. Which is suffering from the same flaws but I find it a bit more accessible. But visiting Paris for the first time was not a culture shock for me at all. However I grew up 800km from Paris. I suppose someone from a totally different culture on the other side of the world might have an idealised view. Especially if they paid a relative fortune to visit it.
Still... It sounds a bit overblown :P There's many movies that show Paris quite realistically, I don't think anyone truly interested would not pick up on that.
In any case, it's certainly no substitute for the real thing (but I'm sure everyone kind of understands that).
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-art/The-mediu...
This is true in theory, in practice you will meet arrogant and unhelpful museum guides, tons upon tons of people not respecting all the basic rules (no flash, be relatively quite, etc) and a labyrinthine place which can give you anxiety if you are just visiting one day and want to see as much as possible. I went there like 8 years ago in very low season I cannot imagine how it would be today in a post-covid summer with all the instagramers and tik-tokers. So in the meantime I would enjoy all those marvels a my leisure pace in my computer. There are million of things we cannot experience directly and they are still worthwhile to see in original or imagined illustrations, from celestial bodies to ancient civilizations.
The chatter and humming of people around, by itself was worth going to the museum, seeing how fathers describe the items to their children, and how sophisticated-looking folks talk and such.
It was a magnificent experience that nothing compares to it in the digital world (yet).
So yes, nothing makes up for the visceral experience of seeing real art and heritage face to face but if you can't get there or are a researcher or school teacher or artist looking at historical techniques or...[insert many other use cases here], online collections play a hugely valuable role.
Plus of course, art like this is often paid for by the state and so the public "owns" it and should get the widest possible access to it.
Its a different experience than seeing it in person. However, there are benefits to both. I've seen gigapixel scans of some of the greatest paintings in history that let you zoom in on the tiniest details and see the brush strokes, the texture of the dried paint, the cracks and aging, etc. For some of the same pictures if I saw it in person I'd be a dozen feet or so away from it because its too valuable to let people get close. Entire objects are virtually invisible viewing some paintings in person.
One of the ways that budding artists rapidly improve is by copying the works of master artists as a study. It should be pretty clear how this tool might be useful to them.
>Part of what makes the Louvre or other museums special is being in a beautiful and decorated historically important space.
Architecture is great, but what makes the Louvre special is the caliber of their art collection. Some people will never be able to afford to see it in person. Why not let those people appreciate the art from afar?
Even if a person can afford to go on an expensive vacation, there's a million breathtaking places to visit in the world. One can't visit them all.
My partner does fine art painting (portraits, still life), and has created many a master copy. Many times actually working in a museum every day with all the gear for weeks. (Patrons love this novelty.)
We've ordered many a high quality print selected from online collections for further study.
I wonder if digitising collections like this might go some way towards resolving this sort of problem?
1. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/42-dragon-psychology-...