Google’s new Arts & Culture app brings the world’s art

Google has created a virtual museum. The search giant has launched a major overhaul for an unusual app: Google Arts & Culture. Available on both iOS and Android, it contains images of art from thousands of artists, historical images and documents, and virtual tours of culturally signifi cant locations around the world. It’s all thrown together in a kind of miscellany, with no obvious utilitarian purpose. Much like a traditional museum, in fact.

You can take a ‘virtual tour’ (using Google’s Street View tech) of the Sheikhupura Fort in Pakistan, read an article on the history of Brazilian music, or check out a gallery of the works of fifteenth-century painter Andrea Mantegna.

It contains more than around 65,000 paintings, nearly 8,000 photos, 19,000 clay objects, almost 7,000 sculptures, 202 mahogany objects, and four made out in cinnabar, among countless others images.

One of the most interesting aspects of the app is its ‘Art Recogniser’. It does what it says on the tin and uses your smartphone’s camera to recognise art at certain museums (just the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, for now) and then provide more information.

Google says it plans to bring this functionality to more museums as time goes on: “We’re planning to roll this out to museums around the world — so stay tuned.”.