A Rembrandt in virtually everyons's living room?

The launch of the Google Art Project (GAP) promises the most ambitious virtual art experience, as esteemed museums in Europe and the USA display their art to an online global audience. This new web space promises users an astounding range of art to browse through in their own time and in their own manner of choosing. This new space also promises to challenge the traditional museum experience as users can have a 360-degree view of galleries, with an option to zoom in or out. Such promises however, have triggered a flood of reaction, starting with the more typical fear of a physical space being replaced by a virtual space and how this would impact museum attendance. Opposed to that, the optimists see this as a strategic means to get the visitor into the museum by, ―looking through the Google Art Project is a bit like walking by a bakery, smelling the brownies and shoving your nose against the glass. It intensifies the hunger rather than quashing it,‖ (The Economist, February 2011). This study aims to help position the complex relationship between new media and high culture. Besides comparing online and offline art spaces, this thesis researches a more grandiose idea; the possibility that high culture has, at last, become accessible, where the virtual art space of the GAP is making art enjoyment and knowledge a democratic and global experience. Therefore, by implementing qualitative and quantitative methods and positioning the user as central – a ―visitorcentered‖ (Hooper-Greenhill, 1994) study - this investigation sheds light on the users‘ opinions, feelings and beliefs about this virtual museum realm, contributing to the main aim of the study. The data of this research argues that the GAP is a lens with expanded utility in enjoying art, evoking from educational to sensational experiences to the ―virtual‖ users, revealing the edutainment nature of the online art realm. It is proposed that a virtual art space could potentially mediate our mind, our senses and our memories, by creating new or evoking ―real‖ memories and emotions through the virtual navigation with active and critical engagement of space and art. Overall, the virtual art realm could present itself as an opportunity for museums to strategically reinvent users‘ perceptions about engagement and entertainment to a diverse public. The primary contribution of that thesis lies on addressing the amateur and the high culture relationship, by highlighting the potential museums have to rebrand their identity due to the growth and importance of online art spaces‘ in our contemporary environment.