I'd like to open a discussion about Google's recently launched Art Project:
www.googleartproject.com
Basically they picked several major museums around the world - the National Gallery in London, Rijksmusem in Amsterdam, the Met and the MoMA in New York, and about 10 more - and used their Google Street View technology to photo the entire museum. You can walk and look around, or search for a specific room or picture, and for the most important pictures you can also zoom in to watch them in very high resolution.
It is amazing and I highly recommend a tour. The high resolution makes you see things in a painting you could never see otherwise, certainly not on the web, but not even in real life: every crack, brush stroke and paint splash. The interesting thing about it is that they didn't try to creat just a high resolution version of the many art databases on the web, but rather went for entire museums. So the museum in itself is considered an art work, not just a storage place for art works, which is a nice concept. There are many obvious pros and cons for such a virtual tour: to mention just a few, you lose the magic of the real museum, you win a tour with no noisy tourists around; you win a look at a picture in perfect lighting and with no annoying reflections, you lose the volume and smell of paint accumulated on canvas.
However, I think a discussion about the pros and cons is quite futile, because anyway, the aim of this project is not to replace real museums. What would interest me is to understand what a tour of the Google museum is. In other words, since in the near future I can only visit Versaille through Google, there is no point in thinking what I miss in not visiting the real thing, but it is interesting to think what it is that I'm experiencing.
The first thing that comes to my mind has to do with the high resolution feature: I mean the fragmentary way of looking at an artwork. I walk up to a picture on the wall of the "Mars Salon", it is a portrait of Marie-Antoinette and her children. It looks nice, so I stand in front of it to have a closer look. So far, nothing special. Only now, as I move to high resolution mode, I am locked in that single picture. My eyes can't wander around, can't shift to the next picture on the wall. Zooming in is not the same as having a closer look. Every picture is a completely separate fragment, I am immersed in it, and have to press quite a few buttons to move to the next fragment. Now since the picture is very big and the computer screen very small, if I watch it in its entirety I can hardly see anything. I have to keep zooming in, to see a smaller fragment which will make any aesthetic sense. So now I see only Marie Antoinette's soon-to-fall head, flanked by that of her admiring daughter and that of the baby, impatiently looking away and trying to get free from her grasp. Beautiful picture in itself, but some important things have been left out, for example the third child and the empty cradle. I move to them - yet another fragment. In order to connect it with the former, I have to use my memory, not my sight. And so on. This is a something which also happens when we look at a big picture in the museum - we can't see everything at once - but the shifts of the eye are so quick and continuous, that the fragmentization process is felt much less strongly, and in a way we do get "the whole picture".  Furthermore, the high resolution feature makes you want to look at smaller and smaller fragments, each beautiful in itself. The queen's pearl earing. What a masterpiece. This tiny object fills the whole screen, so it is longer a detail in a picture, but actually a picture within a picture. I stay in this high zoom-in, and drag the mouse to other such amazing little pictures. The curls of greyish hair. The plume in the fantastic hat. The green eye. The picture inevitably gets split to a myriade of fragments, considered each in its turn.
As more museums are added to the site, I'm sure wandering in the Google museum will become a common way to consume art. So I'd be very interested to hear more thoughts and impressions about this virtual experience.