“It’s easy to practice choosing art, when you are browsing
online from the privacy of your own home,” says Fleur Allen, director of the
Interactive Arts gallery.
Here are three good sites for learning more about art,
artists, and art collecting.
Artsy is an online platform for discovering and collecting art.
On the Artsy site, you can see more than
30,000 artworks by more than 6,000 artists from leading galleries, museums,
private collections, foundations, and artists’ estates. Artsy has partnered
with 400+ galleries and 100+ museums and foundations.
To make it easy for collectors to find specific types of
works online, Artsy initiated The Art Genome Project. Like an art-focused
search engine, the Art Genome Project enables you to explore art by style, subject
matter, medium, technique, or region.
For example, when you hit the term “collage,” you will see a
definition for collage (“a two-dimensional work created from an assemblage of different
materials”) and more than 1,200 examples of collages by various artists. Choose
“sort by year” and you will see how collage styles have evolved from 1913 until
the present.
The Art Genome Project can be used either for self-guided
learning or to discover works for sale. More than 10,000 of the works on Artsy
are available for sale, with prices ranging from under $1,000 to more than $1
million. You can use Artsy to contact the seller directly, or discuss questions
about the work with an Artsy specialist.
The Artsy blog features easy-to-read posts about artists,
their projects, and various exhibitions.
Thanks to Google high-resolution imaging technologies and
expertise from collection curators, you can study 30,000 works of art from over
150 collections in our 40 nations. You can examine works at brushstroke-level
detail, take virtual tours of museums around the world, and build world-class virtual
collections without spending a dime.
Some of the art institutions you can “visit” online include:
The Art Institute of Chicago, the Auckland Art Gallery, the Acropolis Museum,
the George Eastman House, and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Museum
of Russian Icons, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the
Israel Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the National Portrait Gallery,
and the Tate Britain.
Expertly narrated videos, audio guides, and viewing notes
make it easy for you to learn more about the paintings, drawings, sculptures,
historic artifacts, and photographs in the museum collections.
Using Google’s online tools, you can create and share virtual
art collections that would be impossible to match in real life.
Artspace is a digital marketplace for fine
art and design. The site offers limited editions and original works from rising
stars to the most recognized artists. For beginning collectors, they have a page
of artworks starting at $100.
Part of the Artspace mission is “to help collectors and
aspiring collectors discover, learn about and collect fine art.” In keeping
with their role of online “art advisor,” they publish dozens of feature
articles and interviews with artists, advisors, and collectors.
For example, their “Art 101” page contains a variety of
useful features such as:
As you spend more time studying art online, you will become
less anxious about asking “dumb” questions when you view art in person. Most experts agree that viewing art online can be fun, but it is no substitute for experiencing art in the size and form the artist intended.
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