Why Watercolour on Google Arts and Culture beats Watercolour World

There's a new website called Watercolour World which purports to be making images of watercolours around the world accessible to all.

The Watercolour World (TWW) is a registered charity that is creating a digital database of all pre-1900 documentary watercolours in the western tradition. 

The About Us page on Watercolour World

It forgets to mention in a prominent way - although it's there in the terms and conditions - that this is a "look but don't touch" website.

That's because those involved with the project invariably make images of artwork available under an "all rights reserved" banner - despite the fact that the artwork has been out of copyright for very many years. The copyright in this instance relates to creating a digital copy of the work. 

A few - such as the British Museum - make their images available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence - which means they can be accessed by students and others learning about art for their school or college projects.

It's also funded by a Foundation which has absolutely no cogent information on the Internet and no track record in terms of history of doing similar projects.

One wonders who did the due diligence in the organisations that are co-operating. They certainly don't know how to look up records at the Charity Commission.

It's said to be operating under a similar model of operation to Art UK.  Now I'm a fan of Art UK and one wonders why the watercolour exercise couldn't have joined it.

• It took over the project to put all the oil paintings online. 
• It's also developed a nice sideline in selling prints of the artwork. 

I wonder how long before the same happens to the watercolours........

Statistics on the watercolour World website - indicating where most paintings are coming from

I'm not convinced that this is the right way to make watercolours more accessible to all. 

It strikes me that what we have potentially have here is

• a gigantic exercise in commoditization of the country's art collection - without any external accountability to those that actually own the artwork i.e. the country's taxpayers It's a way of putting less taxpayer's money into museums and art collections because of the income earned from sales - which is only generated if the artwork can be all over mugs and mousemats.
• plus a marketing exercise for manufacturers of digital scanners

Extract from the Art UK website - showing how digitised art is being made available as aprons and tea towels

It is in any case entirely pointless. I absolutely guarantee that before very long those who are completely besotted with Pinterest will be pinning away and losing the link to the original site - and ergo the copyright statement!

More to the point, all those who also love selling prints online will have snaffled them and be selling them all over the place. Such individuals have never yet read copyright notices and I see no reason why they should start now.

The thing is if all artworks which were out of copyright were made available online and accessible to all then the market for snaffling them would simply disappear.

Watercolour on Google Arts and Culture

I'm a big fan of Wikimedia Commons and the way that very many collections have made their artwork available online there

My personal preference in terms of image quality is Google Arts and Culture which was created by Google's Cultural Institute - see From self-portraits to street art: 1,000 museums at your fingertips

Watercolour on Google Arts and Culture

Take a look at Watercolour on Google Arts and Culture

It accesses many of the same artworks HOWEVER

• It's a much more sophisticated operation with a better vision of what is possible
• it's also a superior operation in terms of image quality. It invested in an infinitely superior method of scanning them which enables us all to look very closely at them to see how they were painted. - see the Gigapixels project to zoom into artwork - which is truly stunning and takes my breath away every time I look at an image using the Google technology
• Plus it can take you to the Museums that house them and using Streetview inside the Museum you can see the artwork on the wall 
• Plus they provide intelligent commentaries on mini projects.
• Plus the website is HUGELY more sophisticated.

Now that's a real education!