The Met digitizes its immense art collection so you can fill it with weird dog-people
Last week, the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York announced that all of their public-domain artworks were now available for anyone to use via Creative Commons. That means that about 375,000 pieces of canonical artwork are free to download from the Met’s website and use however you’d like. Slap one on your new mixtape, it’s fine. Post one above your new blog post about voter fraud. It’s whatever. As The New York Times notes, a few other museums have done this recently, and it’s worth taking a minute to remark that this is a function of the internet doing the democratizing and enlightening work that its utopian founders in Silicon Valley prognosticated. It is not all Bee Movie memes and racist eggs: The National Gallery has 45,000 open access artworks, and the Rijksmuseum has over 300,000. The Met will be digitizing even more. Breathe that in.
Done? Cool, because someone on Twitter is faceswapping the Met’s images. Dog people!
Dog person!
Cat person!
The Met has, presumably jokingly, retweeted a request that Buzzfeed’s Jen Lewis continue this noble work, and also that these images be given their own wing in the museum. While that will not happen, it is certainly a good idea that someone continue fixing classic artworks so that they feature more dog people and people dogs, as well as cat people and people cats, and (just spitballing here) maybe babies with old-people faces and old people with baby faces.