ABOVE: Detail from Toby Ziegler’s I’m Ready for Love (2002), a “featured work” on the British Council’s new online collection of art. No, not that Toby Ziegler.

The British Council, arbiters of all Britishness, announced yesterday that they will be placing their entire art collection online for the first time. The council is a huge owner of contemporary British art, but since it ships its collection around the world so that lesser peoples may gaze in rapture at the artistic achievements of their betters, the British people themselves rarely get to see the pieces. And since there are over 8,000 items in the collection, showing them off together in the real world is impossible. What to do?

The answer to that question seems to be “put a bunch of grainy scans on a bush-league website that doesn’t work in any browser except Internet Explorer.” The BBC, the Guardian, the Scotsman—all of them published slobbery articles on the Council’s alleged triumph of e-accessibility, but they seem to have been written before the massively disappointing site actually went online: the images of the art are small and low-resolution, and clicking to get the full-size image in a separate window actually produces a bunch of gibberish in Firefox and Safari. The browser incompatibility is pretty embarrassing, but it is nothing compared to the poor quality of the images available. And most of the “recent acquisitions” have no images at all, with a helpful little sign instead reading “Image Not Available.” This is a nice idea that been done in by shabby execution. Uncool, Britannia.

LINK: BBC > British Council art goes online
LINK: British Council Art Collection