
What Does the Met’s New Online Collection Mean for Art Students? - Tomte
https://medium.com/@wendymac/what-does-the-mets-new-online-collection-mean-for-art-students-5d957b09aaf8#.89safkn7b
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Isamu
Means my daughter, who is visually impaired yet is entering college as a
visual arts student, can zoom in on these with her tablet and appreciate those
details that a regularly-sighted person takes for granted.

Thanks for this, I am going to point her to this collection.

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Finnucane
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.

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lqdc13
It looks like you can only zoom in into 53,482 results out of 445,203 records.
The other ones are low-res images.

Out of these 50k, only 2002 are painted after 1900. It seems like
[https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/](https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/)
has a lot more stuff.

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

[http://art-slideshow.net](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...](http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ao/original/VS91_37_16.jpg)

...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.

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rayuela
That is an awsome website! Would you happen to have the collection of all
those images available for download anywhere?

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eightfold
Thank you!

I don't have them for download, but this is the script I used to download and
resize them all. It took about 24 hours for me:

[https://github.com/zensible/art_slideshow/blob/shared/lib/ta...](https://github.com/zensible/art_slideshow/blob/shared/lib/tasks/import_csv.rake)

Just go through the install steps in the README and run the above. It may take
a smidge of hacking to get it working, this hasn't been polished for public
consumption.

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abetusk
Wow, surprised nobody linked to their GitHub page [1] which you can use for a
local database of artist, reference number, URL, time period, license, etc.

[1]
[https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess](https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess)

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Ros2
If you like looking at really detailed art/architecture, these two paintings
are some of my favorites :

[http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/459032?sortBy=Rel...](http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/459032?sortBy=Relevance&amp;ft=luca&amp;offset=0&amp;rpp=20&amp;pos=12)

[http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437244?sortBy=Rel...](http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437244?sortBy=Relevance&amp;ft=giovanni+paolo&amp;offset=0&amp;rpp=20&amp;pos=2)

Stunning. You can't even get this close to the top of the Panini because it's
huge.

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gt_
As incredible as this technology is, the last thing modern art students need
is more of is anti-social origin worship. This is a step back from media into
medium, and a wholly worthless one in the context of contemporary art
education. This is useful for historians alone. An utter distraction for
someone looking to understand art.

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anotheryou
I wanted to implement this as one of the first things while doing an online
portfolio thing for art students. This and mailing lists. Sadly the company
didn't make it that far.

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tempodox
For an organization that's supposed to be artsy, those flickering images on
their front page are a pain in the butt.

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o_____________o
Here it means corpus-lusting datapigs will be pilfering all they can to stuff
into their style transfer troughs

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komali2
What are you trying to accomplish by posting this?

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theoh
In the GP's defense, the idea that great art will inevitably now be reduced to
templates for style transfer algorithms is not too far away from Google's idea
that scanned Google Books will serve as fodder for a future AI, i.e. their
purpose is not to be read by humans but by machines.

The choice of words is fairly strong but I guess the kind of person who is
upset by philistinism feels strongly about it, art being a matter of personal
feelings...

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o_____________o
Well said, thank you! It was actually a self-criticism about some perception
shifts I've noticed in myself after using this tech.

I'm excited to be on the cusp of upending human exceptionalism, especially in
fields as emotionally precarious as art – a skill taken to be a rare
specialization.

There's something wonderfully spooky about arriving at change this profound
while thoughtful approach withers against the collective bedroom curiosity of
a million Seymour Krelborns birthing an organism with nothing more than a
laptop they bought for college.

