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The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like

Open Culture: “Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history texts and art books in general. Just this week, they announced an expansion of access to their digital archive, in that they’ve made nearly 88,000 images free to download on their Open Content database under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). That means “you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.” The Getty suggests that you “add a print of your favorite Dutch still life to your gallery wall or create a shower curtain using the Irises by Van Gogh.” But if you search the open content in their archive yourself, you can surely get much more creative than that. The portal’s interface lets you search by creation date (with a timeline graph stretching back to the year 6000 BC), medium (from agate and alabaster to woodcut and zinc), object type (including paintings, photographs, and sculptures, of course, but also akroteria, horse trappings, and tweezers), and culture. The selection reflects the wide mandate of the Getty’s collection, which encompasses as many of the civilizations of the world as it does the eras of human history…”

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