Google releases an impressive Arts and Culture app

The Internet is great for watching cat videos and letting off some steam with nonsense on your social networks, but it’s clear that most of us don’t take advantage of its vast potential for supplying knowledge. The Google Cultural Institute is an initiative born in 2011 with the intention of digitizing and propagating some of the most important artistic and cultural works in the world, with all its content also now available through the official Arts & Culture Android app.

With more than 900 associated museums and 200 monuments and world wonders, Google’s intention is to offer filtered and organized content from different cultural spheres, offering images, videos, explanatory texts, and a smart schematic for browsing aimlessly through all the sections, fully accessible from the search tool.

Thus for example if you search for the British Museum, you’ll come across more than 4,000 high-resolution images of museum material as well as a few other collections where the articles’ provenance is explained in professional articles. The zoom on the photos lets you view everything down to the finest detail, as you can see in the attached screenshots.

But you can go even further: all these references also converge on themed articles where you can learn more about the items’ creation and historical context, so you can also find entries by historical period or specific event.

Arts & Culture is a brilliant app that takes up just 52 kilobytes, as it extracts all its content from the official website of the Google Cultural Institute to offer a huge amount of content that’s easily accessible from your Android.