I am standing in the central hallway of the National Gallery as the Christmas markets go up outside in Trafalgar Square. The Gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, is unveiling its latest collaboration with Google Arts & Culture (GAC), the non-profit arm of the world’s fourth biggest company. He’s here with GAC’s founder, Amit Sood, and the two beam with pride as they introduce a crowd of journalists, patrons and trustees to the website’s new features, which include online exhibits on artists and famous paintings and an AI tool composing soundtracks to the collection’s most celebrated artworks. Technically speaking, it’s impressive.
GAC has been a partner of the National Gallery for more than a decade. The website today counts 50 million users and is also available as an app (one million downloads, including my own, dating back to 2019 when GAC launched a feature to determine which seventeenth century portrait you most resembled based on a selfie submission). Over 13 years, GAC has democratised access without precedent to some of the world’s most prestigious collections. Anyone with an internet connection can browse the artworks on display at the Tate Galleries, MoMA and the Musée d’Orsay, zooming into details and studying the minutiae of artefacts that date as far back as the 50th century BC (in the case of the Leang Karampuang cave painting in Indonesia).
