Just seeing the crayon colours painted on the tall iron fence of the 18th-century Parisian townhouse made me shiver. The big panda in flip flops in the lobby, arms up in greeting, scared me. And the petite ham sandwiches getting wheeled around to Google staffers looked positively menacing.
The more playful Google gets, the more paranoid I get. We are still trying to fathom whether the tech behemoth is a boon to society or, as Rupert Murdoch’s lieutenant Robert Thomson charges, a cynical, rapacious, “often unaccountable bureaucracy” running “a platform for piracy,” gobbling up all the intellectual property in the world for its own profit.
So when I heard that, building on its plan to digitise all books, Google had opened a cultural institute in Paris to digitally replicate and curate all art and culture on Earth, I wanted to check it out. Europe is, after all, hostile territory for Alphabet Inc, with its highest court upholding people's right to be forgot- ten and lawsuits looming over the tech giant's suffocating business practices.
Despite the cheeky sign on the door of the grand building on Rue de Londres – "I'm feeling lucky" – I wasn't the only one with mal de mer. When the institute had an opening fete two years ago, the French culture minister was a no-show, warning about "an operation that still raises a certain number of questions".
Perfect ambassador
Meeting the head of the institute, Amit Sood, a Bombay native in his mid-30s, made me suspicious at first. Looking cosy in a long grey cardigan and black sneakers, he’s a preternaturally perfect ambassador, like a high-powered Google algorithm designed to co-opt museums and foundations so charmingly that curators will barely know they’d been appropriated. But the guy seems sincere.
"This is our biggest battle, this constant misunderstanding of why the cultural institute actually exists," he says. "In France obviously there was a lot of scepticism about why is Google entering this domain."
From the most famous paintings of the Uffizi to an archive of South Korean film to virtual galleries of the pyramids, the institute has already amassed an impressive collection. Sood has serenely fielded the questions about whether his project will lead to people prowling museums from the comfort of their couch, filtering and missing out on actual visits.
"I've seen Starry Night at MoMA probably 30 times in person and I have the most high-resolution digitised image of that on my platform right now," he says, "but every time I come to New York, I still go see Starry Night." He added there was "awesome" data showing that "physical attendance at museums is rising at a rate never seen before, especially in countries and museums that have cool digital initiatives."
To critics who accuse him of dumbing down art education, he says: "To some extent I do want to dumb down a few things, because I think some things are too highbrow at some point." He talks about "the mom feature": his Indian mother doesn't care about Impressionists and thought he was "wasting" his life on this project, but when he showed her gold jewelry from Bogotá, Israel and the Met on his site, she became a fan.
Accessible
"So for me," he says, "the routes into the person's mind to get more interested in culture, history or wonders can be many." Sood was not an art aficionado when he and some colleagues launched the project, trying to come up with a way to make art in western museums accessible to people in countries such as India and make it look magical online, with the ability to zoom in on each brushstroke of the Chagall ceiling of the Paris Opera.
When Sood lived in London he went to museums just because the cafes were good places to meet interesting people. But now, he says, “I value what’s going on and I think you have to be patient. You can’t expect museums to move at the pace of the internet.”
Sood says Paris was chosen for the endeavor in order to confront the scepticism head on – “If I can convince them, I can convince practically everybody” – and as bait to recruit the best engineers.
“In Paris, it has not been easy,” he says. “But we’re getting there. More and more institutions are signing up.” He has now lured in more than 850 museums, archives and foundations in 61 countries and hired several people he first pitched the project to – experts from the German ministry of culture, the Met, the Tate and Versailles.
He and his colleague Laurent Gaveau have cast a wide net, creating an archive of street art, histories of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Lahore crafts and textiles.
They didn’t get to Palmyra to film the nearly 2,000-year- old temple there before Islamic State blew it up, but Sood suggested they could re-create it online. He has tried to soothe fears that technology ruins the experience of viewing art and that Google will gobble up content, offering museums a delete button that removes all content from the site.
“I don’t care so much if they use Google or not, to be very blunt,” he says. “I care more that cultural institutions that have great stuff under lock and key put it out there for anybody to download. If they want to put it on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, be my guest.”
Could there be a digital version of one of those famous French art heists? “Of course I could be hacked,” Sood says, adding wryly: “I don’t know if there’s a teenager sitting somewhere wanting all the Rembrandts.”