Google Arts & Culture

Google Arts and Culture provides free access to collections from museums and cultural institutions worldwide, organised as online exhibits, themes, artist and artwork pages, and places. It includes very high resolution artwork imagery, street level views inside museums, and experimental tools published through its Lab, and is used in classrooms as a source of primary cultural material.

Extremely high resolution imaging is the capability that makes this more than a catalogue. A student can examine brushwork on a painting at a level of detail unavailable to a visitor standing in front of it behind a rope, which inverts the usual relationship between reproduction and original.

Coverage across institutions is the other half. A teacher building a lesson on a movement rather than on a single museum can draw works from collections on several continents into one narrative, which no individual institution's own site permits, and which is how the subject is actually taught.

The classroom value is real but the fit is imperfect and worth stating. This is a public cultural platform rather than a teaching tool: there is no lesson structure, assessment or class management, so a teacher supplies the pedagogy and uses this as the source material. That is a reasonable division of labour, but it means the platform is not a substitute for a curriculum.