25th May, 2012
Last month, the Google Art Project launched its foray into Indian museums with a dazzling whirl of images. When worldwide director Amit Sood was asked by reporters how his team had managed the feat, he laughed and said, “It’s magic.”
There’s no denying the thrill of virtually viewing art from museums around the world. It might not exactly recreate the experience of seeing art in person, but it has its own advantages. For instance, the zoom feature – made possible by high-resolution photos – allows you to see details you might otherwise miss. Google’s Street View technology lets visitors navigate through each museum. It’s technology at its flashiest, but is it also a step towards making art more accessible?
The Delhi launch marked the inclusion of the National Museum and National Gallery of Modern Art in the Project’s second phase, along with museums in Asia, Africa and South America. “I would like as many museums in India to join us,” Sood said, but refrained from revealing whether any other museums were joining the project. “I’m a big fan of the Salar Jung museum in Hyderabad and the NGMA in Mumbai,” he added. “It’s just about time to get everything ready and start adding them.”
At its February 2011 inauguration, the Project had digitised the collections of 17 museums, including big names like New York’sMuseum Of Modern Art and the Tate Britain, but faced criticism for ignoring non-Western art. “The intention to add Asian and Islamic art was always there, the resources weren’t,” Sood told us. Negotiating with museums wasn’t easy, he said.
One reason for the challenge, at least in India, is that online art has always been linked to commercial projects. Online auction house Saffronart is a case in point. “We started off as collectors of art and found that there was a big gap between information, access and transparency,” said Dinesh Wazirani, Saffronart’s founder. The Waziranis started Saffronart in 2000 to address this gap, but later opened physical galleries in Mumbai, New York, London and Delhi. “We found that our model was a brick and click model,” Wazirani said. “The physical spaces built up relationships and gave people an opportunity to actually view the art, and then the internet… was the transaction medium to purchase and browse.”
Saffronart’s success inspired several online galleries or online shows. Last November, the Mumbai agency Burgundy Art organised Indian Art Collective, the country’s first online art fair. “The cost of participating in an online art fair is one-tenth of that of a real art fair, and this enables galleries to give younger artists a chance,” said founder Sapna Kar.
While these initiatives have been geared towards buying and selling, there are other benefits. Saffronart’s website includes high-resolution images, artist profiles and descriptions. Wazirani pointed out that “people living in smaller cities rarely get to view what’s going on in Delhi or Mumbai… the internet has allowed the market to become very broad.” In the last five years, Saffronart’s auctions have witnessed an increase in bidding from cities like Hyderabad, Pune, Ludhiana and Chandigarh.
What makes the Google Art Project unique is that there is no buying and selling involved. “There is no monetisation. It is funded by Google in its mission to make information more accessible,” Sood said. “The challenges were about convincing [museums] that this is really about access. That’s when they get interested.” It’s hard to miss the irony in the tech giant’s private initiative to make public museums’ collections more accessible. While the National Museum’s website provides only the most rudimentary information, the NGMA’s updated website has more images. Seventy-one of these, chosen by the Museum, are in the Google Art Project. “We don’t curate,” Sood said. The museums also handle the copyright clearances. While the NGMA’s selection is far from comprehensive, it does provide an overview of Indian art, with modern landmarks like Tyeb Mehta’s Santiniketan Triptych and MF Husain’s Zamin.
The Project’s appeal extends through interactive features like user-curated galleries and links to video lectures. Sood confessed that he didn’t know much about art while growing up in India. “I thought it was a niche thing,” he said, “but when I moved to New York, I saw that anybody and everybody was walking into a museum for free.” Perhaps seeing our public institutions alongside the best in the world will get people walking into, and demanding more from, India’s own museums.
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