Well now you don’t even have to travel the distance it takes to move your mouse to the URL bar. Google has started the Google Art Project, a new web site that collects art and museum images from around the world.

Each image can be zoomed in on and has a sidebar with history, viewing notes, related media, and other relevant information. There is also information on the museums themselves, include video and images of the museum layouts.

While Google has only partnered with 17 museums so far and within those museums mad only a small selection of art pieces, this looks like a promising project. I can see it being useful to beginning art history majors, art enthusiasts, and anyone interested in art who can’t travel to a foreign museum.

For me, even though I’ve been to Versailles it was nice to be able to zoom in on art pieces I was too far or too hurried to really examine.

I believe children are challenged less and less by what they take in from culture. Much of their input comes from FCC-sanitized network television, where gunshots occur but never cause too much bleeding. They are ill equipped to deal with controversial issues because they are largely sheltered from the reality of them. They are not introduced to canonical literature until much later in their education and in my opinion they are less capable handling the social ambiguities of this literature.

In the case of Huckleberry Finn, many teachers are banning or skirting over a pivotal part of the American literary canon because it contains frequent use of an offensive word. These teachers are often afraid to address student discomfort for fear of inciting students’ or parents’ wrath. Instead of teaching students the historical context of the material and examining the differing attitudes of the past and present, these teachers are brushing years of social history under the carpet and letting children deal with them in the outside world without the tools to analyze them.

We need to instill a healthy reading culture at an earlier age. Students are introduced to much more insidiously harmful material in pop culture, whether it is misogyny in music or racism in the casting of their favorite films.  If they encountered difficult reading material in an academic setting at a younger age, these students would be better prepared to intelligently process it. Students can learn so much from the irony of Mark Twain or the adept prose of Charles Dickens despite their respective uses of racial terms that are offensive in today’s society. They can also learn a lot about our progress (or perhaps lack of progress) as a multicultural society by looking at the history of race and class relations.

• Apparently if you’re Ethan Coen’s 15-year-old kid, you don’t have to deal with boring credits like “assistant to script supervisor” in films. You can be Matt Damon’s abs double.
• I’ve got to tout my former neighborhood of Astoria by pointing out The Village Voice’s write-up of a new French bistro there. 
• Is the Borders crash a sign of the end of days for the book industry? Probably not.
• Speaking of books, there’s going to be a sanitized release of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn without Huck’s infamous use of the “n-word.”
• Explosions in the Sky will be playing the surprising mainstream Radio City Music Hall. 
• Do you know who Kurt Schwitters is? According to the Wall Street Journal, probably not. 

Enjoy!

So what to do if you can’t hop on a jet to Paris to see that new exhibit of avant-garde frog photography? Harness the power of the internet, my friends. Many museums have extensive gallieries and information right on their websites. Here are the best of the best when it comes to museum websites.

The Louvre

No need to brush up on your French for the website of the most visited museum in the world. The thoughtful cyber-curators produced virtual tours for those who don’t feel like ponying up thousands of dollars in travel expenses to visit this Paris museum. While like real museum-goers you might first check out landmark pieces like the Mona Lisa, don’t discount the lesser-known collections such as this 3D exhibit of a Bawit Monastery or a virtual tour of the museum’s Islamic art.

La Cinémathèque Française

Fire up your high school French (or Google Translator) to check out the stunning site for la Cinémathèque française. The ever-modest institution describes itself as the most important film archive in the world. It backs up its boasts with incredible collections of films, set pieces, props, and costumes from some of the most important cinematic works in history. The website features a “zoom sur les collections” section where one can zoom in on pieces from the collection such as whimsical drawings by Méliès or the robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

MoMA

Of course some of the best use of the internet as a gallery comes from the Museum of Modern Art. You can browse the collections, preview exhibitions, or download their free Abstract Expressionism NY app. The site is multimedia rich, with behind the scenes audio and video for installations like this guy playing piano from the inside out.

The Studio Museum in Harlem

For one of the best collections of works by artists of African descent, The Studio Museum in Harlem is the place to go. While the museum’s website is certainly media-light in comparison with some of the larger museums, it serves as an excellent introduction to past and present artists who are often overlooked.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This large Boston-based museum features interactive tours of its extensive international art collections. Its Asian Robes & Costumes and New England collections are particularly unique.

The British Museum

The British Museum ranks with the Louvre as one of the largest and most popular museums in the world. Its website makes for perfect teatime browsing with the online tours and an interactive experience for children.

The Smithsonian

While the vastness of the Smithsonian isn’t pared down well on the website, a visitor with the patient to sift through the many, many collections will find a wealth of images and information on the institute’s official website.

Here are a few entries on celebrities from the scholars at UD, edited for space but with glorious typos still intact:

Simon Cowell: A judge on Pop Idol and American Idol. He has a strange liking for high trousers and he is disliked because he is honest to stupid crap wannabes who can’t sing.

Hugh Jackman: the best name if you are in a porno flick

Seth Rogan: A fat unattractive man who dates a hot woman.

Kanye West: he outsold 50 cent’s get rich or die trying, and curtis. but he’s still not jesus.

Weezer: A band so awesome that they can sing about cheese and make it sound cool.

Tina Fey: 1. Writer and performer for Saturday Night Live. 2. The greatest WWE Champion of all time.

Meryl Streep: 1. A famous person, I think. She just looks like someone’s aunt to me. 2. Only the best actor on the face of the planet, you face-ass.

David Bowie: Musical equivalent of the Big Bang.

Neil Patrick Harris: Legendary

• Do you like your pop culture news sources to be self-aware? You’re in luck because Vulture has made a “slideshow-based list of Vulture’s best 2010 slideshow-based lists.” Now you too can become an expert on the Coen Brothers’ use of mustaches.
• Jennifer George, daughter of Broadway producer George W. George, gives some advice on how the new Spiderman movie can avoid the fate of her father’s infamous flop Via Galactica.
• The AV Club has rounded up the most anticipated pop culture releases of 2011.
• LA Times has its own year-end round-up of people to look out for on the 2011 arts scene. Featured faces range from Latin American art curator Ilona Katzew to comedian Chris Rock.
• My Modern Met has a beautiful collection of light graffiti photos by graphic designer Darren Pearson.
• Unplggd profiles some eyes masks that will make you look like you’re in an 8-bit Nintendo dreamland.
• Tarantino gives Pixar some love in his favorite movies of 2010 countdown.
• Self-Styled Siren writes in memory of recently deceased Japanese actress Hideko Takamine.

That’s it for now!

• The Washington Post examines how the Lincoln Center redesign is an example for public art buildings across the country.
• Social networking may be leading audiences to hold Hollywood accountable for crappy films.
• North Korea’s choice for its first Western-made film to be aired on TV? “Bend it Like Beckham.”
• AV Club lists 24 songs that nearly ruin otherwise great alums.
• Kevin Smith is shunning interviews outside his Smodcast Network for the upcoming release of Red State. I’m starting to suspect that Red State is a vehicle to promote Smodcast and not the other way around.
• Conor Friedersdorf argues for HBO-style parent warnings on movies instead of the current MPAA system.
• Attention Lit nerds: check out this interview with the primary organizer of the Boston Public Library’s “The Public Life of Poetry” exhibition. I’m hoping to attend the show myself in the next month.
• Screenwriter Ken Levine has discovered the secret formula for writing a cable TV drama. It involves elderly 80′s has-beens and the phrase “You’re gonna get us killed!”
• Want to be seriously creeped out? Spend some time looking at Muppets with People Eyes then lobby Congress to put a ban on Photosohp.

Happy New Years! See you all in 2011.

According to my lazy, Google-based research, the Treasury has stuck with green for all of its anti-counterfeiting features. The specific green ink used is hard to copy and tends to stand up pretty well to daily wear and tear. Apparently preserving the value of the dollar has taken precedence over giving design geeks some monetary eye candy. As a result, we get dull gree busts of our elderly founders on our bills while the Cook Islands get bright blue naked mermaids on theirs.

Anyway, here are a few of my favorite currency designs from the PSD Tuts round-up. You can see their full list over at their site.