Art Zoom: Online Art History Classes Taught By Your Favorite Musicians

Google Arts & Culture’s video series “Art Zoom” allows its viewers to look at art from the perspectives of musicians from different corners of the world.

Written by Katie Karp

With “Art Zoom,” seeing art through the eyes of a musician is now possible. Produced by La Blogothèque, which creates original musical experiences for its viewers, the video series explores historical artwork through the lens of today’s popular musicians. Google’s Gigapixel art camera enables musicians to zoom in on the details while describing their connection to the artwork. Though art enthusiasts may long to physically return to museums, the series allows viewers to get a closer look at some of the most renowned art pieces from all over the world.

Last June, Google Arts & Culture released the first episode of what is now a two-season series to celebrate the 130th anniversary of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” In this episode, Maggie Rogers explains her fascination with the untouched portions of the canvas and how Van Gogh “let the canvas be an essential texture on the page.” Rogers also considers that “Starry Night” was painted three months after the artist cut off his ear, not long before he died. She compares Van Gogh’s post-impressionist painting to David Bowie’s final album Blackstar in that both works demonstrate, “someone being alive and creating that work that says goodbye at the same time.”

Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, Canadian musician Leslie Feist, Girl in Red, and Lolo Zouaï narrate the other four episodes in the first season. Cocker zooms in on Monet’s use of color to soften the “coldness of the modern metallic environment” in his 1877 painting “La Gare Saint Lazare,” and Feist explores the place “where work and life are fading into one another” in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Babel.”

Lolo Zouaï fixates on early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli’s attention to beauty in his painting “Birth of Venus.” The France-born American musician also highlights the relevance this 15th-century painting holds in contemporary pop culture, whether it be Warhol’s own rendition or Lady Gaga’s ArtPop album cover. “Do you remember Beyonce’s pregnancy photos? It’s kind of the same look on her face,” Zouaï says.

Photo courtesy of Beyoncé Knowles via Instagram

In the fourth episode, indie-pop musician Marie Ulven Ringem, better known as girl in red, examines fellow Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s esteemed 1893 painting “The Scream.” Compelled by the bold colors and distorted elements of the surrealist work, girl in red relates to the painting “in the way that life around me is kind of distorted sometimes.”

The parallels between the musicians and the art they selected becomes clearer in the second season, which was released on September 15.

The season kicks off with FKA twigs’ discussion of the 1623 painting “Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy.” In this episode, twigs connects with both Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter of the piece, and Mary Magdalene, the subject of the painting. Twigs looked to Mary Magdalene for inspiration in her second studio album, MAGDALENE, while exploring her femininity and role as a woman in a patriarchal society. The “mary magdalene” singer feels that Gentileschi captures the same view in her painting of Mary Magdalene by demonstrating the biblical disciple’s strength and eroticism. On the development of her latest project, twigs told “Art Zoom,” “When I was researching Mary Magdalene … she seemed so poised and put together. But the irony is in finishing my music, I found a deep wildness, a looseness, an acceptance of a new peace, and that’s what I'm experiencing from this painting.”

In her episode, British musician Ellie Goulding admits her love for the color blue. This is evident in the title of her latest album, Brightest Blue, which she says Yves Klein’s “Large Blue Anthropometry” allows her to explore. “To me, it feels like a color that has no end. The color of the sky, the sea, of infinity.” Like FKA twigs, Ellie Goulding also spoke to artists’ reexamination of gender norms, explaining that Klein’s use of women’s bodies as brushes for his artwork was revolutionary. “It was probably a strange thing to do back then: stop women’s bodies from being a sexual object and use them as an instrument for creation,” she muses.

Chaeyoung, a member of the K-Pop group TWICE, admires the abstraction Yoo Youngkuk played with in his 1959 painting “Mountain.” She also admits it was the bright colors that attracted her to the painting, the same way that colors stand out to her when she chooses her clothes: ”The first thing that grabs my attention is the color.”

Likewise, Matty Healy of the 1975 also appreciates Mondrain’s use of “geometry and colors to reach the foundation of things” in “Grande composizione A con nero, rosso, grigio, giallo e blu.” The means by which Mondrian connects with his audience also resonates with Healy. The musician refers to the internet as an initial “utopian dream of connecting and uniting people” and Mondrian as a visionary “who planted the seeds of that 100 years ago with his radical new language where art reaches towards utopia.”

Grimes, the genre bending Canadian musician and visual artist, discusses Pieter Brugel the Elder’s “The Fall of the Rebel Angels.” She is naturally drawn to the unusual and quirky details in this painting, highlighting “farting demons” and “naked creatures showing their guts.” Grimes confesses, “I’m just super attracted to that kind of thing.”

J.Balvin, whose reggaeton music is often interpreted as colorful and playful, admires Francisco Botero’s art and what it did for their shared nation of Colombia. Noting that despite the common perception of Botero’s painting “20 de Julio” as being “naive or humoristicas,” the characters’ faces are rather serious. He attributes this to Botero’s desire to depict Colombia as a vibrant place even during a time of violence. “It was very important for us that he represented Colombia in the art world at the time when everything was about narcos. Botero was definitely a bright light in the darkness.”

By appreciating the beauty and intricacy of art, “Art Zoom” acts as a source of light during this turbulent age of COVID-19. “Art Zoom” reminds its viewers of the magic of art, whether that be on a canvas or in a song, and the internet’s ability to deliver an endless, diverse range of it.

Afterglow ATXOctober 21, 2020katie karp