
The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online - malshe
https://kottke.org/18/11/the-art-institute-of-chicago-has-put-50000-high-res-images-from-their-collection-online
======
ohnonotyouagain
On a technical note, the Art Institute of Chicago images are being served
using an API called IIIF, which allows you to scale, extract regions of
interest, etc. [1]. There are about 1-2B images worldwide being served from
museums and libraries using the API [2] and viewers that can work with the
content from multiple institutions at the same time, for instance to compare
two van Gogh self-portraits from different museums:
[http://projectmirador.org/demo/](http://projectmirador.org/demo/)

[1] [https://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/#image-request-uri-
syntax](https://iiif.io/api/image/2.1/#image-request-uri-syntax) [2]
[https://iiif.io/community/#participating-
institutions](https://iiif.io/community/#participating-institutions)

~~~
TekMol
Interesting. There seams to be no way to get a list of available images or a
search though. How would one us this API without info about available images?

Or am I missing something?

~~~
raawa001
Here's the link for the search API:
[https://iiif.io/api/search/1.0/](https://iiif.io/api/search/1.0/)

~~~
mejackreed
This Search API is focused on searching within IIIF content (think full text
search of a book). There is currently a Discovery Working Group[1] looking at
broader discovery of IIIF resources.

[1][https://iiif.io/community/groups/discovery/](https://iiif.io/community/groups/discovery/)

------
malshe
The link to the Art Institute of Chicago:
[https://www.artic.edu/articles/713/behind-the-scenes-of-
the-...](https://www.artic.edu/articles/713/behind-the-scenes-of-the-website-
redesign)

From the link:

Students, educators, and just regular art lovers might be interested to learn
that we’ve released thousands of images in the public domain on the new
website in an open-access format (52,438 to be exact, and growing regularly).
Made available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, these images can
be downloaded for free on the artwork pages.

We’ve also enhanced the image viewing capabilities on object pages, which
means that you can see much greater detail on objects than before. Check out
the paint strokes in Van Gogh’s The Bedroom, the charcoal details on Charles
White’s Harvest Talk, or the synaesthetic richness of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Blue
and Green Music. If you are doing research, you’ll appreciate how our
collections search tool makes it easier to drill down and find exactly what
you’re looking for.

~~~
sgc
How is it possible to release _public domain_ images using a CC0 license? That
sounds completely unenforceable to me.

~~~
freddie_mercury
Why would it be in the public domain?

If I take a photograph of something, don't I own the copyright to that photo?
Even if it is a photo of the Mona Lisa or the Parthenon?

~~~
kps
In the US, no. A photograph of a 2D artwork is just a _copy_ of that artwork,
and not a copyrightable original work.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).

~~~
ZenPsycho
in Australia, yes a photographic reproduction of a 2D artwork _is_
copyrightable. this was a point of conflict between the wikimedia foundation
and a gallery i used to work for, which made a significant income from
licensing photos of artworks, many of which were themselves in the public
domain. this might seem unreasonable but it’s worth pointing out that
producing _highest quality_ photo reproductions of artwork is a specialist
skill requiring quite expensive equipment, and there are specific choices that
must be made that are on some level subjective. to put it in hacker news
language- it’s a lossy operation and the photographer decides what is and is
not important to keep- e.g. textural or reflective properties of the paint,
vs. vividness of colours. and how exactly are you supposed to reproduce
photographically the gold foil on gustav klimt’s work?

A CC0 license or some such could well be a reasonable hedge against such
vagueness by making explicit the terms of use.

~~~
steve19
A Xerox machine is a complicated, specialist piece of equipment but using one
to duplicate the work of someone else is not and should not allow copyright on
the duplicate.

What your colleagues did is literally reproduce the work of another, and
assert copyright on the copy.

What if I took the image your gallery took, used state of the art JPEG
compression software on it and created a new optimized file, would I know be
entitled to copyright on that?

~~~
lb1lf
But a Xerox machine does not add any creative aspect; if you are going to
shoot a painting and do it well, you'd need to decide on what lighting you
wanted, then rig that - say, side lighting to highlight the brush strokes or a
more head-on, softer light to subdue them.

In your jpeg example, I think (IANAL!) you might have had a stronger case if
you artifacted the heck out of it, rather than faithfully recreating the
original photo - the artifacts could be argued to be some form of artistic
expression.

~~~
steve19
How can it be creative if it literally is attempting a faithful reproduction?
You are confusing work with creativity. It might not be easy, it might require
a lot of effort by specialists, but it is not creative. Therefor should have
no copyright protection.

~~~
lb1lf
As I suggested - the photographer may decide to highlight the brush strokes,
for instance - or subdue them. Both approaches would be a faithful (as such
things go) reproduction of the original artwork; its appearance would depend,
among other factors, of the light you saw it in.

That being said, I am not convinced such reproductions should have full
copyright protection on par with that granted an original work of art - but
there ought to be some mechanism to recognise the effort and skill which went
into creating it; otherwise there would hardly be any incentive to create high
quality reproductions.

Tricky, that.

------
adriand
This is pretty incredible.

There was once a time when the only way for the average person to see a
beautiful painting was to go to church. Later on this role was taken up by art
galleries. Now anyone can see this stuff from the comfort of their own home.

What do you think this means for the future of art galleries? What are they
_for_? Different ones are answering this question in different ways. Some are
reinventing themselves successfully, others not so much.

I am particularly interested in the destiny of galleries in smaller markets.
They are easier to sustain in large cities. In cities with fewer than a
million people, the struggle for relevance makes for a challenging
environment.

(My questions aren’t rhetorical - I sit on the board of directors for a
Canadian gallery in a city of 500k people - we have one of Canada’s largest
collections and an incredible program, but nothing is easy...)

~~~
faitswulff
I feel like reducing historical art pieces to "beautiful images" doesn't
really capture what it means when something is art. For instance, you can view
reproduced images of famous artwork whenever you want online, so what makes it
valuable, therefore, is not just the imagery.

~~~
jmkd
No one ever complained of flickr "Oh it's okay but you need to see the real
thing", so it's interesting how this viewpoint is absolutely medium-specific.

I would argue plenty of paintings are better viewed online, sculptures far
less so. Is it better to have a restricted view at the back of a live
performance or see a perfectly edited video later?

It's hard to be moved shuffling through queues at the Louvre.

~~~
ska
Many types of paintings are fundamentally three dimensional - something that
really isn't captured in an image.

You make a good point about the different value of different presentations. In
some ways the bad seat is better than the video, in others not.

------
mmmBacon
The Art Institute has always been very forward looking when it comes to
technology. In the mid 90s I was offered a job there creating a new collection
tool for curators that would allow them to view ALL of the Art Institute’s
collection and help them create new exhibits. I think only 10% of their
collection at that time was on display. They were going to build the tool in
C. They were also very progressive to hiring as I didn’t know C and the team
was willing to teach me. It was a very cool job but I didn’t end up taking it.

------
veridies
Is there any sort of organized, searchable index of artwork online? It's sort
of a massive undertaking, but it's the kind of thing that a wiki would be good
for, and there have been a handful of different museums which have made these
kinds of sets available.

~~~
jmkd
Google Arts & Culture [1] aspires to this, and does a great job to a certain
extent, however not at scale or in the long tail. For their own reasons
institutions have resisted mass uploads to Google - despite the theoretical
marriage of CC licences and G A&C non-profit contractual agreements. Art
Institute Chicago has been a partner with Google since 2012 yet today we see
only ~1% of their artworks on G A&C. [1]
[https://artsandculture.google.com/](https://artsandculture.google.com/)

~~~
exodust
Unfortunately the images cannot be downloaded from Google Art Project
(original name).

It's irritating having to jump over complicated hurdles to get a seamless hi-
res image capture from Google Arts. It requires some messing about, but I
previously managed to grab about 100 high res images, but it took ages and was
not easy. They printed out nicely in the end though, so was worth it.

A simple download link as seen on artic.edu would be appreciated but sadly I
don't see Google providing this because they want people to remain on Google,
logged in, while they view art.

~~~
jmkd
I was deeply involved in the project for 5 years and the reason you can't
download from it is because museum partners don't want you to. All the image
security you find there comes from partner requests. If it's irritating, don't
blame Google.

~~~
fandango
No. Don't shift the blame to other parties. Google decided to play ball with
all these external requests. Google owns the project. Google is the one to
blame.

~~~
jmkd
Sorry, also no. Let me be clear, museum partners would not sign contracts -
and thus the project would not exist - if these stipulations about preventing
downloading were not met. It was a dealbreaker across the board, and Google's
compromise was a good one. Without it there would not be this access to art
and culture.

------
virtualritz
What does high-res mean? I downloaded Hokusai's 'Great Wave' and I got a 6.2MP
JPG (3k pixels horizon.). That's not high-res at all when considering the
original's size. Am I missing something?

------
envoked
A little bit of a shameless plug but for anyone interested in the intersection
of art and tech, Arthena (YC W17) is hiring software engineers and data
scientists.

[https://angel.co/arthena/jobs/](https://angel.co/arthena/jobs/)

------
an4rchy
It's great to see museums working towards spreading the reach of their
collections and reaching new audiences.

Also for folks interested: SF MoMA was doing something similar where if you
texted them a word they would send you a picture related to it (from their
collection)

[https://www.sfmoma.org/send-me-sfmoma/](https://www.sfmoma.org/send-me-
sfmoma/)

The museums could also start selling prints online as well, perhaps create new
means of funding for the museums

------
freyir
The Art Institute of Chicago is where I appreciated art for the first time. It
has an amazing collection, and it's not an overcrowded zoo, especially on
weekdays.

------
Confiks
I'm glad they state on their website that the images are in the public domain.

In a similar thread on HN some time ago, I was very surprised to learn some
museums (and commenters) think that they own the copyright to high-resolution
digital reproductions of their (pre-1923) collection:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17500312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17500312)

~~~
gpvos
Different countries, different laws.

~~~
Confiks
Indeed, but for that specific case of the Van Gogh Museum in The Netherlands,
the same principle from Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. was reached in
the Van Dale/Romme arrest [1] and has been upheld in other cases.

[1]
[https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_Van_Dale/Romme](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_Van_Dale/Romme)

------
werber
When I was a kid my parents would take me to Chicago once a year or so and the
art institute was always the highlight. This makes me really happy

------
tsumnia
Is there a link to downloading copies of the images?

~~~
matthberg
Here's the link, it's basically their collection page filtered by the ones
they released, each artwork page has links to download the image.
[https://www.artic.edu/collection?is_public_domain=1](https://www.artic.edu/collection?is_public_domain=1)

~~~
slig
It's basically impossible to browse most of the pictures sequentially because
the UI keeps loading new images on the bottom of the page after clicking "Load
more" and the browser will crash after loading so many images on the same tab.

It's a shame, because it obvious that a lot of work and care was put on this
project.

------
dgarceran
When I change time filter from present to 1930 it returns this:
[https://www.artic.edu/collection?is_public_domain=1&departme...](https://www.artic.edu/collection?is_public_domain=1&department_ids=Photography&date-
start=1800&date-end=1930)

~~~
Zeebrommer
Errr.. `date-start=1800&date-end=1930`

~~~
dgarceran
Yes? What's the problem? It's a normal search in a page like that

------
shmerl
It gives me server errors.

Example: [https://www.artic.edu/artworks/181616/self-portrait-
etching-...](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/181616/self-portrait-etching-at-a-
window?q=Rembrandt)

~~~
jon_richards
I found an even less pretty error:
[https://www.artic.edu/artists/36351/pierre-auguste-
renoir](https://www.artic.edu/artists/36351/pierre-auguste-renoir)

~~~
shmerl
Yeah, I got a bunch of JSON errors as well.

------
cambaceres
Searched for Monet, the first three paintings result in internalservererror:
[https://www.artic.edu/collection?q=monet](https://www.artic.edu/collection?q=monet)

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Yeah, I found about 10% of the links of the random sampling of paintings I
looked at (about 30) gave 404 errors.

The images are nice, and definitely suitable for desktop wallpaper, which is
what I'm interested in, but they're not all that high-resolution. They seem to
vary between 2k and 3k pixel resolution.

------
hiei
Truly my favorite museum in America.

~~~
fermienrico
How does it compare with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York?

~~~
tptacek
It's a great museum, among the best museums (full stop) in the country, but
it's less than 1/4 of the size of the Met.

~~~
forapurpose
True, but after a certain point size doesn't matter for the visitor. I can see
only a small fraction of the Met in any visit; IIRC a prior director said he
couldn't see the entire collection, including the majority which is not on
display at any one time, in his lifetime. If the Met grows, it doesn't change
the size from my perspective.

If you are interested in specific individual collections then size might
matter; if you are interested in Polynesian art, then possibly you could
exhaust the Met's or Chicago's collections (I don't know).

But in some respects the two museums are the same size. And to go off on a
tangent, I now find that I gain much more by spending a long time, maybe 30
minutes each, with a few works of art, rather than spending a few minutes each
with 100 works. So for me, a museum with 10 great (IMHO) works would be plenty
big, and better than a museum with 100,000 works that I have to sort through
or walk past to find the ones I'm interested in. (Though the odds that the
10-piece museum would have what I want are a bit longer.)

~~~
kasey_junk
For the record both the Met & the Art Institute have enough great pieces to
last your whole life if you are into contemplation.

For that matter I spent an hour with the Art Institutes paper weight
collection one time and felt I learned something.

------
Noos
I'm not sure what to think. It's a form of accidental post-modernism.

The translation and simulation of the art ends up being very post-modern in
its implementation. There really is no one experience to viewing this
collection; some of us may view it on our phones while at work, some people on
a gorgeous hi-res screen to see every brushstroke, some on a washed-out $199
laptop screen, some on a $50 Kindle Fire as a homework project, and some
secondhand, like the pictures on the blog that links to it. It's very much
anti-modernist in that it denies the physical presence of art and is arguing a
little for the death of the artist (i do not mean literally) by severing
viewing his art from viewing the actual piece; that the meaning can be
adequately shown by a simulation designed to be accessible to all, and that is
reductionist to boot.

The weird thing is that this is accidental-the postmodern presentation is not
done specifically for effect, but it's a byproduct of a very modernist idea
about the importance of viewing great art. The simulation is created and is
given weight and importance, but there is no commentary or reflection on it;
the format is simply there because postmodernism is the only way to simulate
in this media. To render physical artwork on the net will always be a
simulated, reductionist project in some manner.

The person who goes to a museum, somehow records his experience on video, and
narrates his thoughts is making in his own way an equal simulation yet
superior. He is also reducing the art into a simulation, because its
attributes cannot be fully transmitted to another medium without reducing it,
but he enriches it in a sense by the depiction. There is the post-modern
interplay between viewer and viewed, between work and audience, on display and
then reflected again by the person watching his video on youtube.

Here there is still these elements, but in an odd situation. Maybe it would be
like those old VHS tapes that tried to faithfully reproduce a Broadway show
performance, or records that did opera. The goal is fidelity but the medium
transforms it just by the simulation. It may be valuable in the sense
simulations are, but it's also transformative due to the medium used. It
creates a weird thing divorced from itself, but with no commentary or
reasoning that acknowledges it.

So mixed feelings. Maybe its just my mountains of sketchbooks filled with
amateurish art talking, but i'd prefer even an art book to this, I guess.

~~~
Fuzzwah
I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on a virtual museum experienced via
a VR headset and room scale tracking?

------
bickfordb
In a case like this, would the public domain license be revocable if the
copyrightable painting were transferred?

------
eptgrant
Downloaded an image, it was only 3.6MB.

Is this what I should expect? Seems rather small...

------
tonto
Cloudfront 504 error to
[https://www.artic.edu/collection?is_public_domain=1](https://www.artic.edu/collection?is_public_domain=1)
?

~~~
modzu
took a dump for me too when trying to search the gallery.

its awesome and i love they are doing it!! now get your IT together ARTIC!!!

~~~
modzu
downvoted because...?

seriously try the search it just returns some json lol:

[https://www.artic.edu/collection](https://www.artic.edu/collection)

(in other words there aren't "50,000 high res works online" if nobody can
actually see them...)

------
TheOtherHobbes
Love the images.

But this does the not-unusual thing of not saving your place if you scroll
down a few pages, click through to an entry, and then click back to the
catalog.

------
ApolloRising
Site stopped loading many images due to hackernews effect.

------
mushufasa
whoever makes artpip, can you please include these? I was disappointed from
the switch to photography only.

------
nerdponx
This is wonderful news. Thank you to whoever made this possible!

------
internet555
That’s so cool! I really miss Chicago some days.

------
jordache
website is horribly slow.

