This real­ly caught my eye…

If you did­n’t make it to the Mark Rothko exhi­bi­tion at the Tate Mod­ern (and chances are you did­n’t), then you can still see it vir­tu­al­ly. As you’ll see, the Tate Mod­ern has cre­at­ed a fan­tas­tic web site that lets you take a panoram­ic tour of the Rothko col­lec­tion. Once you enter the tour here, you should switch into full screen mode (look toward the bot­tom of screen), then use the arrows and your mouse to move around. You can move from room to room, and zoom in on var­i­ous paint­ings. Quite the way to see an exhi­bi­tion if you can’t make a long jour­ney.

Let me bring this to your atten­tion. Erwan Bom­stein-Erb, the founder and direc­tor of Canal Edu­catif in Paris, has released a doc­u­men­tary (in Eng­lish) about The Gates of Hell, a mon­u­men­tal project that Auguste Rodin worked on, not nec­es­sar­i­ly con­sis­tent­ly, for 37 years. On its own, this video is worth your time. But you should also know that this is one of ten films about major art­works that Bom­stein-Erb plans to pro­duce in HD. Canal Edu­catif is all about using the inter­net to pro­vide glob­al access to “cul­tur­al cap­i­tal.” A goal that we can whole­heart­ed­ly sup­port. This kind of phil­an­thropic ven­ture is hard to fund, espe­cial­ly dur­ing these dif­fi­cult times. So Bom­stein-Erb is look­ing for spon­sors and part­ners to sup­port his mis­sion. If you would like to get in touch, you can drop him a line through Canal Edu­cat­if’s web site. Last­ly, you should check out the Canal Edu­catif chan­nel on YouTube. Good luck Erwan.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art His­to­ry Web Book

Now there’s a nice alter­na­tive to the tra­di­tion­al, expen­sive art his­to­ry text­book. The folks at smARThis­to­ry have cre­at­ed a free mul­ti-media web-book that offers a dynam­ic sur­vey of art his­to­ry. The online resource com­bines tra­di­tion­al images with audio and videos, and the beau­ty is that you don’t have to read this web-book in a lin­ear fash­ion. Rather, you can sort through things by time peri­od, style and artist and find the infor­ma­tion that you want. In case you’re won­der­ing about the cred­i­bil­i­ty of this resource, it does­n’t hurt to men­tion that one of its founders, Beth Har­ris, is the Direc­tor of Dig­i­tal Learn­ing at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art in New York City, and the oth­er, Steven Zuck­er, is Dean of the School of Grad­u­ate Stud­ies at the Fash­ion Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, part of the State Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. Have a look.