Thanks to this joint initiative between Google and the Museo del Prado, masterpieces from this Spanish Museum’s collection will be the first to be available for study and appreciation from every corner of the globe through their presence as giga-pixel images. Through its involvement with this project the Prado aims to be a pioneer in the possibilities offered by the new technologies for the dissemination and promotion of the artistic heritage. These spectacular images of its works, which are only available on Google Earth, will allow scholars and art lovers to appreciate from close up the most minute details and motifs represented, the lines and brushstrokes of each artist, the under-drawing, craquelure of the varnish and many other aspects difficult to see at first hand.

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Acclaimed artist Michael Craig-Martin has designed a stunning major public artwork on the two-storey staircase of the new state-of-the-art Docklands Light Railway (DLR) Woolwich Arsenal station extension. Commissioned as part of DLR’s major public art strategy, this is the first time that Craig-Martin has worked in ceramic and his first public transport project.

Michael Craig-Martin’s artwork – Street Life – has been developed in response to the function and architecture of Woolwich Arsenal station. Integrated within the mosaic tiling of Greens End, one of the station’s two entrances, the ceramic artwork depicts a series of everyday objects against a background of vibrant colour. The artwork encircles the entrance walls and the staircase well welcoming daily users and visitors alike, and inviting the audience to recognise a shared language of objects.

In the artwork, Craig-Martin explores the dialogue art can open between representation and reality, and between artist and viewer. Here a set of everyday objects – such as a mobile phone and bunch of keys, a book and a drinks can – have been drawn against a background of flat, intense colour. Despite the objects’ differences in size and function in reality, here each image is the same size and each carries equal importance. In the simplest way, reference is made to music, sport, eating and drinking, home and work. Craig-Martin has always been concerned with a desire to make sense of the world we share, and the expressive power of the ordinary objects. The selection of these objects, their colour, spatial relationships and inexplicable juxtaposition provide the work’s tension while providing opportunities for viewers to interpret as they wish.

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Scientists at the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) in Los Angeles have developed a new method for authenticating historic photographs that could have broad implications for museum collections, art historians, collectors and conservators. The secret they’ve revealed lies deep within the photograph itself – each chemical printing process leaves behind a series of markers that collectively can be as distinctive as a fingerprint, if you know where to find it.

In the past, the accepted methodology for the authentication of photographs has been based on the visual or microscopic inspection of photographic images – never a foolproof process.

Now, using nondestructive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry analysis, GCI Senior Scientist Dusan Stulik, GCI researcher Art Kaplan, and photographic conservator Tram Vo have been able to successfully identify the hidden chemical signatures associated with different photographic processes and to provide a scientifically-based method for provenancing and authentication of a majority of 20th century photographs.

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