About the guides
Before you press play, you can read who made the work, where it lives, and how we know. That page is a guide. This page is about the guides themselves.
One page per artist and per museum, built the same way every time.
An artist guide opens with a short biography, the movements the artist worked in, and the museums that hold their work. Below that sits the collection itself: every piece we stream from that artist, named, dated where the date is known, and credited to the museum that owns it. A museum guide works the other way: what the collection covers, its hours and address, and what to see first if you only have an hour.
The guide and the player are two views of the same thing. The guide is what you read before you press play. The player is where the paintings move.
A painting on a screen with no name attached is decoration, not art.
Momentable streams work that museums have opened through open access: free to view, free to redistribute, on the condition that the source is named. A guide is how we keep that condition. Knowing that a self-portrait is Gauguin's, painted the year he left for Tahiti, and held today by the Musée d'Orsay, changes what you see when it fills your screen. The guide is where that comes from, so the player can stay quiet and let the work fill the room.
Every claim on a guide traces back to a named source, printed on the page.
Biography and dates come from Wikipedia, checked against the artist's recorded birth and death years before a guide goes live. Artworks are credited to the museum that holds them, with the licence that lets us show it: public domain, or a Creative Commons licence with the artist and source named in full. Museum hours, addresses, and collection descriptions come from the institution's own published pages. Where a fact is uncertain, or two sources disagree, we leave it out rather than guess. Every guide ends with the same line, because it is true of every guide: independent guide by Momentable, biography from Wikipedia, artworks credited to the museum that holds them.
1,000+
artist and museum guides live
0
invented facts, unclear claims left out
Named
source on every biography and every image
Free
to read, and free to stream from
Every guide opens the same way: read first, then watch the work play, free, on your TV, phone, or tablet.