As reported on The Verge.
By Andrew Webster
Museums can be overwhelming — often, there’s simply so much to see that it’s hard to properly interact with each piece you come across. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is looking to change that with 82nd and Fifth, a new web series aimed at teaching you why 100 different pieces from the museum matter. In each episode museum curators examine one work — whether it’s an Antonio Rossellino painting or a room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright — and spend two minutes or so explaining why it’s important and how it has influenced their view of the world.
Each episode also comes coupled with an interactive feature, letting you explore the work in a different way, like a 3D model of “Madonna and Child” that can be viewed from multiple angles. It’s sort of like a personal, guided tour of the museum, and the concept is very similar to the BBC’s A History of the World series, which looked at 100 influential objects from the British Museum. There are already six episodes to check out, with two more to be released every Wednesday until December 25th, 2013.