Last week, Google Art Project launched, and it either registered with you not at all or was the biggest news of the week—at least that's what I keep hearing from the endless, all-over-the-place (Googlian?) press coverage of the thing. (Roberta Smith's overview in the New York Times is the best and smartest so far.)

As for me, I finally fully disappeared into its universe yesterday afternoon, and I took snapshots all along the way, then stashed them in a folder called "Places I Have Been in Google Art Project." (I did this the tremendously inelegant way, by screengrabbing; this was before I fooled with the program's own decent make-your-own-collection tool, which will be unbelievable for professors who want to show details in class.)

The Places I Have Been in Google Art Project include the cracking and mysteriously scratched face of Marie Antoinette at Versailles; deep, deep, deep into Van Gogh's starry night, somewhere out among the 7 billion pixels of the Gigapixel version of the painting at MoMA; up the skirts of multiple museums (name those two!); into the armpit of the Venus of Urbino; high up to where the map on the wall hangs from a miniscule painted nail in Vermeer's portrait of a soldier and a laughing girl at the Frick (picture not worth sharing; imagine the tiny brown bits of paint adding up to a nail and its slight shadow); into a sun-streaked chapel at the Cloisters; and, well, that is an incredibly short list of the amazing places I intend to go and have to stop writing this list in order to get back to.

So, yes, Google Art Project is cool. Very cool if you love art. Even cooler if you are a museum junkie.

Here's how it works: Seventeen museums around the world each made certain rooms available to Google's Street View-making process (someone from Google comes and films, turns it into a 360-degree-navigable panorama). Those rooms (mostly galleries but bookstores too in some cases) are now navigable via the same Street View-ing you do on Google maps. Then, each museum selected certain art works that would be clickable for zooming. These high-res pictures are great. But each museum also picked a single piece to receive the super-duper, seven-billion-pixel treatment, which takes you madly inside of the surface of the piece. (This is why these programs are made for older art, and painting over sculpture; much newer and/or sculptural art is not as visually dense, or in some cases even visual at all in that old painterly way.) Google says you can see things here that you can't see with the naked eye; Roberta Smith points out a naked backside she found wayyyyyy in the background in Bruegel's Harvesters at the Met. (I have helpfully screengrabbed that bum above.)

Insane zooming is not my favorite part of GAP, though it's fun. My favorite part—what GAP has that other art viewers don't—is the contextual experience. Want to look at the floor and the ceiling? Done. Those gold-and-black Deco frames you remember on the Whistlers at the Freer? There they are, and they're as good as you remember.

As has been pointed out already, this is not so much an art-viewing program as a museum-viewing program. Seeing art in situ is powerful in a couple ways. One is scale. Not only do you understand size, you also understand how distorting digital images otherwise are. Here's a haunting cemetery of a ruin at night, by Caspar David Friedrich; here it appears, relatively small, in its light-drenched gallery. You get the power of imagination—the human mental zooming—required to enter Friedrich's cemetery in the museum setting.

Google is famous for intending never to do evil; is GAP inherently good for art? Well, not really; it's closer to amoral. It reboots masterpieceism, which doesn't need any encouraging—the Gigapixel treatment is the latest in pedestal technology. And while GAP does increase the virtual footage of publicly traversible space online, the museums don't show anything they don't want to. Certain rooms and works are conspicuously left out. Whistler's green-and-gold-o-ganza Peacock Room at the Freer? That neat-o oval room at the Uffizi? Not on GAP. Though the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art are on GAP, neither of their flagship works—Picasso's Guernica and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—are shown on GAP.

Who knows exactly why certain things are shown and some missing on GAP? It's a combination of happenstance, logistics, copyright, and maybe unspoken philosophy. It's revealing that blurry areas on the walls at MoMA are paintings whose reproduction rights the museum hasn't secured. (You are reminded that even owning an object doesn't mean owning the rights to reproduce its image.) Other gaps on GAP raise questions: Are the cool rooms left off as an implicit enticement to make a physical visit and not just a virtual one? Are the major French museums missing because French culture ministers believe in fleshy experience over digital mediation, or will the Louvre and d'Orsay join the list of 17 soon?

Next up: A little more about the Seattle artists and technologists who inspired me to use GAP the way I did, as a place to take pictures in.