Last updated on 12 May 2026
Google Arts and Culture is a service offered by the search giant Google which proposes to put thousands of artworks in the palm of your hand with smartphone or tablet apps.
Whether you like the Big Brother Google or not, it will be hard to deny that some of the Mountain View giant’s services are just …formidable. This is the case here with apps that are beautiful online encyclopaedias offered as a gift to all art lovers.
Once installed on your iPhone or Android, you will have access to works of art in more than 1000 museums around the world. Dizzy. You will be able to take virtual tours of museums, explore major artistic movements, discover thousands of paintings and other works of art in high definition and a colossal amount of information (in English and French) related to them.
No need to try to go around it, you will not be able to do so. Google Art and Culture offers several ways to visit this huge open database. Either you walk through the sandstone of an image, a painting or a museum, or you use the built-in search engine. You can research by artist, type of work, place, event or proximity. An interesting option that allows you to discover works close to where you are.
When you click on an artist’s profile, Google presents you with a complete biography and a collection of their works, each of which is explained and commented on. I love the ability to rank an artist’s work in the app by date, popularity, but also by colour!
The Google Art and Culture app also makes it possible to take virtual tours of the world's great museums. The service also offers daily selections of works in the database and information on temporary exhibitions.
The options offered by the application are too numerous to be reviewed here. We will still retain the visual recognition service of a work still in beta test. You will point with your smartphone at the image of a work of art and Google will tell you who created it and in which museum it is located.
Google signs an app and a service of astonishing richness. Tomorrow we can imagine that all world art will be accessible everywhere, free of charge, all the time …
Google Art and Culture is offered on Android here and for devices iOS tablet and smartphone there.
The project also has a website that can be accessed from your desktop computer.
Link: Google Art and Culture
English
4 Responses
[…] has in all the tools and services that it offers some absolutely wonderful nuggets: Google Arts and Culture, which I have already mentioned here. Google Maps of course for the most used mapping […]
[…] Museo is simple. It’s not much to say. A little too simple even and we hope to see him endowed with some functions that will help research. For this launch Museo offers only a keyword search system. It works mainly in English, but I did some tests in French with the relevant results. Museo is of course missing to grow an advanced search mode. With at least the possibility of filtering the results by author, period, museum ….or even color as proposed by the giant Google Arts. […]
[…] I'm not a fan of Google but some of its services are just amazing. This is the case for Google Arts and Culture, which I have already said all the good I thought in a previous article on its mobile version. […]
[…] This is the first list of major world museums to visit from his computer. And if that's not enough, you can also, I advise you, look at the side of Google. Its mobile app Google Arts and Culture puts works of art from more than 1000 museums in your pocket. […]