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.

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.

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.

Like a gallery, each of these sites is crafted to sell the work or gained future commissioned work. That means that like a gallery, each site tries its best to create a beautiful environment for the work it is promoting. The result can be an amazing introduction to an artist that might have escaped your radar, or better yet access to some excellent art even if you aren’t living in a major city.

A great place to get started on your search is Smashing Magazine, an online designer’s magazine that regularly showcases portfolio websites. The post 35 Beautiful Photography Websites is a good collection to start with, but warning: you may find yourself browsing a little too long!

This raised the question: can public art exist on the internet? If we look at the world of digital art, is it impossible to capture the randomness of audience that is captured by the sculpture at the intersection that everyone must drive past? In this post, I’m taking a look at three examples of online art that I think attempt this sort of spontaneity of viewership that occurs in tradition public art.

The Google Logo

It’s easy to argue that Google, as the most widely used search engine in the U.S., is the main street of the internet. Almost everyone who conducts their business on the internet will log onto Google for a search – probably several times a day. That makes the company’s practice of changing its logo for special occasions an interesting instance of public art.

Over the past few years, the Google logo has been transformed several times to reflect an artistic style or incorporate the iconic images of important events in the history of art, science, and pop culture. While some of these incarnations have been a bit more silly than “artistic” – such as the cartoonish Martians that adorned the logo on Percival Lowell‘s birthday – there have also been allusions to artists and illustrators such as the recent Norman Rockwell-esque tribute to Veteran’s Day. The result is a demonstration of art to unsuspecting site visitors, the pedestrians of the web.

What makes this display particularly interesting is that Google incorporates a feature unique to the internet: it links these logos to a Google search related to the altered logo’s theme. The result? An interactive version of those plaques you see next to a public exhibit in the train station. Not only is the visitor visually introduced to the art, he is given an informational introduction to the concepts it embodies. Furthermore, instead of a didactic plaque, he is offered a tool for immediate personal research – and in a post-Twitter society with increasingly shorter attention spans, this immediacy is vital.

The Bing Front Page

Like with most aspects of Bing, the brand new search engine derives its front page art from Google and expands upon it. Its creators introduce additional interactivity by accompanying it’s ever-changing large photo backgrounds with click-able hot spots. The hot spots feature questions related to the photo’s content and links to resources for answers. While Google’s stripped-down functionality gives the page visitor more independence to conduct their own research, Bing offers a more controlled digital exhibit while still offering the sort of interactivity only the internet can provide.

The MTV Homepage

The MTV homepage may not offer the infinite informational resources that Google and Bing do, it takes advantage of web technology by featuring a different illustration with every page reload. No information is provided about the individual illustrators, but a visitor can experience a variety of artwork relatively unrelated to their task at hand (finding information about music trends), often seeing several works in a single visit. It would be interesting to see this rotating background concept be used to feature the artists themselves or have the sort of interactivity seen in the above examples.