The Last Museum archives 5.8 million artworks housed in the world's museums, from old masters to obscure comic books. Its one of those websites where a couple of minutes turns into a couple of hours without you even realizing how deeply lost you are in it.
There's a date-range slider, and simple filters for artists, specific institutions, and cultures. The search engine is peculiar, rarely returning exactly what I ask for but showing fascinatingly adjacent weirdness. Let's not fix it!
Much of the art we index is in the public domain. Where works are still under copyright, we show them in accordance with fair use:
We operate as a search engine and reference tool, an informational purpose rather than a substitute for the original work.
Works are shown for educational and non-commercial purposes.
We index art that is already freely available to the public online.
Copyrighted works appear only at browsing resolution, not as high-quality reproductions.
Every artwork links back to its original source.
If you sense a certain anxiety there, it's perhaps because museums are often possessive of the public-domain artworks they exhibit, claiming dubious copyright over scans, photos, models and like representations of the original works—or applying clickwrap and thinkwrap contracts that you supposedly agree to when you browse or contemplate their websites. For every Nefertiti bust proprietor, though, there's a more enlightened institution such as the Met or the Smithsonian, which put it all out under CC0.
Previously:
• UK cultural institutions leave their WWI cases empty to protest insane copyright
• Getty Museum posts nearly 88,000 scans of artwork with Creative Commons Zero license
• UK National Portrait Gallery threatens Wikipedia over scans of its public domain art
• The Secret Museum of Mankind website, the 'World's Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs'
