Please use responsibly. Recommended to delay by a few days - it seems like there is an initial surge going on right now. Increase download delay to 20 sec - 1 minute. Be respectful.
This is probably one of the best things I've seen posted in HN. Art books, aside from the actual art, contain essays written by academics or experts not found in Wikipedia or similar. They're also printed in small amounts and fairly expensive (e.g. books on exhibitions are $50-70).
This kind of project opens up a lot of knowledge to the general public.
Now if we could get more Kenneth Clark books reprinted...
Totally agree - the essays/papers/artist ephemera in most of these books are impossible to find and rarely reprinted. I've always found it strange that looking at art is pretty common but reading/talking about art in a critical way is seen as too academic/inaccessible for most people. I hope that by putting this stuff into the public domain more people get excited about Art History - it's a super interesting field that has a lot to offer and learning how to do visual analysis is pretty useful in a ton of different fields.
For me, when I walk through an art museum, my favorite "description" tags are one that are objective - "here's what this art is depicting (if it's not clear), here's some neat historical context, maybe here's a little bit of what the artist said about the work or how it was received."
But then there's tags (at least in MFAH) that were obviously written by someone else and are completely subjective. My favorite one to lambast is just a painting of a black square on a white background, and the description is a 400 word essay about how the work "challenges the boundaries of man" and other phrases that to me are nonsense.
I get that it's easy to pick on Modern Art but I feel sticking to the objective is still possible in that field.
The Bulletins are nice. I particularly enjoy the "recent acquisitions" Bulletins they put out to showcase the highlights of what they've added in the last couple years. Those cover objects from broad swaths of history, from antiquity right up to near-present day.
They say a bit about each object and usually include something about why it was an important item to add to their collection. Some nice perspectives in there.
You can search metmuseum.org itself and they have a filter for public domain paintings. (Use the search bar at the top then after searching click the "The Collection" tab, and the filter will appear.)
I had the idea of Google selfie Art a few years ago and did it with a small team for a museum in Hamburg (open data). I would love to do it for the MET museum as well. I tried some real time face tracking in opencv aswell. The app is called zeitblick. It’s more or less a prototype, maybe some of you will have a joy for interacting with art data creatively :)
I'm in the process of creating a web app for exploring art along historical timelines, and was wanting to pair each work up with critique/theory writings that reference it. This is exactly what I need. Thanks for posting!
I'm really happy their share it though. The collection is just amazing - it's a good idea for "what books to buy for a personal library when you start making decent money". Definitely would spend money on things like this at their store if they sell them.
(I work at the Getty Research Institute)