Freedom For Fine Art | Alternative Fruit

Peploe - Tulips and Fruit
by Virginia5050

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a hub of culture and humanitarian exploration. The Fifth Avenue building is home to some incredible works of art spanning across five millennia of our history around the globe. A little known fact about this institution for quality and fine art is that they also run an ever growing online community dedicated to providing access to a library of art and media for free.


The list of free ebooks ranging in many art world topics has reached over five hundred, and now they are proud to include a library of thousands of fine art images available on a creative commons license. This gives anyone with internet access freedom to download and use any image in the database for their own purposes. Media piracy takes the fun out of being an artist but when something from history becomes so famous and well known, then it does seem only fair to open up the ways we can all enjoy it.


The gift of art and culture that is generously given by the museum's team is just pebble on a huge beach of amazing media and culture that circles the web. Archive.org is another institution offering free access to a huge mountain of media from around the world. It is this community that have worked with the Met on Fifth Avenue to bring the open array of works to the general public.


It is hoped that by freeing up some of the cream of the crop in the world of fine arts, that the inspiration and ideas will catch on and encourage others to think like the greats, focussing creativity in ways that only an art school could have done before. Feeding the world with the highest quality for free makes a great deal of sense, we have all heard the line garbage in garbage out. Some of us will always prefer the underground and hidden gems and don't have much care for the works that define the ages through time, but it is still undeniable that the value within such collections is great.
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