Ryan Millar recently sent me a link to a website called smARThistory, an interactive website meant to replace or augment classic art history instruction. The blurb on the site claims that

“smARThistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art history textbook.”

You can search its database by Time, Style, Artist or Theme and the authors’ – Beth Harris and Steven Zucker – 146 podcasts on different artists and important works of art are casually conversational but still informative. Best of all, with many works visitors can upload their own photos of the artwork to the site’s flickr group, contributing different views of the piece and sometimes answering the “how big is that thing in real life?” question I often have when looking at art in textbooks (something textbooks still have yet to find a solution to). This page featuring Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) seems like a good example of when the site works best, mixing audio commentary, text and visitor views.

Art before 1960 seems to be the site’s strong suit so far, which also resembles a standard art history survey textbook. I sort of wish there were more opportunities for reader feedback and editing, à la Wikipedia, so that alternate interpretations of certain works could be added. Tangential asides from art history profs who want to trouble the narrative of the assigned textbook is often the best part of art history class and smARThistory hasn’t quite figured out how to achieve that yet.

On a totally different note, for those of you who missed it, check out Ryan’s play-by-play of Swan Lake. Hilarious.