The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 375,000 Images of Fine Art Available Under a Creative Commons License: Download, Use & Remix

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From Open Culture:

What do you need to make art? Why, art, of course: the works that have come before provide inspiration, establish a tradition to follow and expand, and now, in our digital age, even provide the very materials to work with. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has assured us that we should feel free to “use, remix, and share” their latest batch of 375,000 digitized artworks of a variety of forms and from a variety of eras in any which way we like. In partnership with Creative Commons, they’ve released them all under the latter’s CC0, or “no rights reserved” license, which places them “as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.”

Link to the rest at Open Culture

PG says this appears to make these specific works of art (not the entire collection of the Met) available for use on book covers.

Here’s a link to Introducing Open Access at The Met for more information.

And here’s In the Library by Edwin Austin Abbey, released under the Met’s CC0 license:


and a photo taken by Alfred Stieglitz in Paris in 1908

and a Migrant Pea Picker’s Makeshift Home, Nipomo, California, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936

3 thoughts on “The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 375,000 Images of Fine Art Available Under a Creative Commons License: Download, Use & Remix”

  1. Awesome! I loved using this museum [online] and a local one as sources for research. I like the In The Library image, I wonder if I could have a bookplate made of it …

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