[screengrab from my profile]

Via C-Monster, I learned that the Brooklyn Museum is sharing images of works in their collection via a Facebook application called Artshare. They set it up so that other institutions can join in too, and so far the list includes

• Metropolitan Museum
• Victoria & Albert
• Indianapolis Museum of Art
• Picture Australia (which combines images from multiple collections)
• Powerhouse Museum
• Walters Art Museum

I particularly liked this, from the Museum's blog announcement:

For the past week, we’ve been uploading (OK, well, Francesca Ford has been uploading…thanks, Francesca) our collection highlights into the application, but then we hit a snag when we got to our Contemporary collection. Since artists often retain the copyright on contemporary works, we stopped uploading and started making phone calls and sending emails to artists and galleries seeking permission to include their work in the first phase of this project. I have to extend my thanks to the artists (Jules de Balincourt, Barron Claiborne, Anthony Goicolea, Rashid Johnson, Lady Pink, Kambui Olujimi, Suzanne Opton, Andres Serrano, Swoon, Yoram Wolberger) who saw the worth in this kind of endeavor and said go for it. We will continue to contact more of the contemporary artists in our collection and add to these initial works, but we wanted to pause now and launch ArtShare for beta testing.

If you're already on Facebook, go here to add it.

Related:

• The Brooklyn Museum group on Flickr
• the ArtCal Facebook page
• the Culture Pundits Facebook page