My new favorite Super Bowl tradition

Art bets!

Like last year, the Super Bowl contenders' home town museums have made a friendly wager over the outcome of the game. The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh has bet Renoir's Bathers with Crab that the Steelers will win Sunday. In return, The Milwaukee Art Museum has bet one of their star works, Caillebotte's Boating on the Yerres. As usual, my favorite part is the trash-talking going on between museum directors. I'll throw in my two-cents and say that being a Bears fan, I can't root for the Packers in good conscience, so go Steelers!

You can read more about the bets here.

Google Art Project launch

Just a quick heads-up: Google launched its brand-new Art Project today. In collaboration with some of the world's premier museums (including the Frick Collection, MoMA and the Uffizi Gallery, among several others), you can take a Google Street View-style walk around parts of each museum, and select from a list of works available to view individually at high-res and with pretty sweet zoom capabilities.

You can check out Google Art Project at www.googleartproject.com

Of course, it's not perfect. Each museum only chose certain galleries to include, so the selection of works included is fairly limited. Also, some of the works seen in the "Street View" of the museum interiors are blurred out due to copyright issues. Hopefully some of these issues can be resolved and the project expanded to include more galleries and more museums, but you can certainly enjoy a digital walk through Versailles while you wait!