Google partners with the Ministry of Culture to take Indian Art andCulture online

Yesterday, Google announced a partnership with two institutions - the National Museum and National Gallery of Modern Art, under the Ministry of Culture to bring its path breaking  Art Project, to India.About Google Art: Google’s art project enables art lovers to discover and view more than a thousand artworks of Indian and global artists in both the museums, online. The highlight of this project is the ‘gigapixel’ photo capturing technology, which has rendered photographs on this project to have 7 billion pixels, allowing the greatest amount of detail. Google has over  151 partners in 40 countries for this project. Users can also stroll through the galleries themselves using the technology from Google Street View and can view more than 30,000 high resolution objects .The Street View images cover 46 Museums as of now. Users may browse the content by time period, artist’s names, the artwork, etc and share them via Google+. My Gallery is an engaging and ideal tool for students or groups to work on collaborative projects or collections.

On the partnership: Kumari Selja, the Hon’ble Minister for Culture said, “I am happy that Google Art Project has created this extensive platform that allows web-surfers to see high quality Indian art and access information about the art works. I am happy that my ministry is partnering with Google to get Indian art and culture online.”

Mr. Rajan Anandan, Managing Director and VP - Sales and Operations, Google India announced, “The Art Project illustrates Google’s commitment to bringing culture online and making it accessible to the widest possible audience. We have partnered with great national institutions like NGMA and National Museum and we hope to collaborate with more institutions across India.”

Commenting on the partnership, Prof. Rajeev Lochan, Director, National Gallery of Modern Art noted, “The main objective of the NGMA, which houses over 150 years of Indian creative ethos, is to create sensitivity and understanding among national and international audiences towards the Indian art expression. The Google Art Project uses sophisticated technology to help us take this endeavor online and available to users globally.”

Shri Pravin Srivastava, Director General, National Museum said, “The Art Project is an important initiative to make available and promote the heritage of our museums using state of art technology. We are extremely happy to be part of this endeavor that enables universal access to Indian art and culture”.

Find out even more about Google Art Project on YouTube.

- Nakul Santpurkar