I'm hooked on this free Google app that transports me to different countries from my couch
I use Google apps on my Samsung phone daily, but hadn't heard of Arts & Culture until recently. I'm more of a gaming and movie enthusiast, and I didn't think it would appeal to me because I've never been particularly interested in art. My perspective changed when I started using the app during my free time and was drawn into worlds that I knew existed, but had never experienced before.
The app has helped me reduce my doomscrolling and explore designs, food, and nature from countries around the world. I find it relaxing to view historical artifacts and famous art, and I feel like I gain valuable knowledge instead of seeking quick dopamine hits. There's always something interesting to see, and the information is never overwhelming because it's presented in bite-sized chunks. I can't travel to all the exotic places I'd like to see, but Google's Arts & Culture Android app is the next best thing to explore the world.
Google Arts & Culture is available for free on the Google Play Store. You can also access Google Arts & Culture from your browser on your Windows PC, Apple laptop, and other devices without downloading the app. Google Arts & Culture is broken into several sections, like Visual Arts, Nature, Design, and more, to make it more organized and user-friendly. Today, I'll discuss how I use the app and the features I enjoy the most. I'll also highlight its shortcomings and features that could be improved.
I didn't think I'd enjoy visual arts
Saeed Wazir / Android Authority
I've never considered myself an art expert, despite appreciating the skill it requires. I was hesitant to try the Visual Arts feature because I thought it would be boring, and I was proven wrong by the vast selection of interesting pieces. Instead of displaying the Mona Lisa and other famous pieces, the app lists the art randomly. I can then scroll through them and pick the ones I like. Sometimes it's classic Renaissance paintings, but most of the time it's just abstract images, bright flowers, and whatever catches my eye. I scroll like I would on TikTok, but I view paintings instead of videos.
I appreciate that I can expand each image to view all its details and read about it with the provided tag, which provides just enough information without going overboard. Art aficionados will likely utilize the advanced search features to find specific art pieces based on the artist, movement, location, and other relevant factors.
I love nature and exploring places I can't visit
Saeed Wazir / Android Authority
I love nature and try to spend as much time outdoors as possible. However, there are still limitations to how far I can go, and that's why I enjoy the Arts & Culture Nature feature. This section mimics the Visual Arts feature by displaying a massive list of stunning locations to scroll through. I get to experience many natural and man-made wonders, like Japan's Ogawa Waterfall or Italy's picturesque Farra di Soligo area, which I'd never heard of until now.
I get to experience many natural and man-made wonders, which I'd never heard of until now.
Out of the countless images available, I always find some that I like, and it's easy to disregard the rest and skip over them. When I'm looking for something specific, I search by country or use the filter to find mountains, beaches, and other geographical landmarks. I find that the information tags in the Nature section can sometimes lack detail, and I need to do independent searches to find out more about a place. It isn't usually an issue for me because I use the same search to download calming desktop wallpapers of the places I'd like to visit.
I find new dishes to try
Saeed Wazir / Android Authority
The Food feature in Arts & Culture showcases unique foods and national dishes from around the world. This feature takes me on a gastronomical journey through different countries to celebrate amazing dishes and desserts. I'm not the most adventurous eater, but I can still appreciate culinary delights and often marvel at the interesting utensils and tools used to make them. Many foods have interesting stories behind them, like how they are grown or unique cooking styles. It's impossible to avoid temptation, and I've downloaded the recipes for Russian Tartar Pie and Mexican Achiote paste based on what I've seen. I'm particularly fond of Italian and Japanese cuisine, and often filter by country to check out the foods I like.
Apart from interesting dishes, Food includes images of some of the world's most famous restaurants and bakeries.
Apart from interesting dishes, Food includes images of some of the world's most famous restaurants and bakeries, and displays information about their cultural significance. It also shows the farms and factories that our food comes from to understand how it's made. Using the Food feature has made me appreciate how lucky we are in the modern era to have such a wide selection of food from around the world available to us at the local grocery store.
I visit countries for free
Saeed Wazir / Android Authority
We all wish we could travel more, but it's usually not possible because of work or family commitments. The Arts & Culture Travel feature transports me to faraway countries to take in the fantastic architecture and scenery that I would never get to see in real life. It displays many tourist destinations, like the Arc de Triomphe and the Taj Mahal, but I prefer looking at pictures of places I've never seen before, like Carisbrooke Castle in England or the Hwaseong Fortress in South Korea.
Travel is probably my favorite Arts & Culture feature because of the amount of detail it offers. It displays the history of the locations under the Stories tab, and I get to see a three-dimensional view of fascinating places under the Virtual Visits tab. I usually scroll randomly to find places I like, but other users may prefer to search for specific destinations or buildings using the search function.
I discover groundbreaking designs that shaped society
Saeed Wazir / Android Authority
Design displays unique and exciting inventions, artifacts, and architectural marvels spanning centuries. Each country has unique designs based on its culture and available materials, and this app lets me view stunning pieces from the past and present. The incredible variety includes everyday items, such as chairs and cabinets, that feature unique designs due to their origin. I can view historical artifacts, like crowns and crucifixes, which are housed in museums, and other items of historical importance.
Design displays unique and exciting inventions spanning centuries.
I'm blown away by the intricate details of vintage furniture and the ingenuity of past civilizations, which used primitive tools to craft objects that have lasted for centuries. The information tags make it easy for me to learn more about the designs I'm viewing, and some of them have unbelievable backstories of how they were created. I can also search by the designer or origin if I'm looking for a specific piece that interests me.
I like this app, but it isn't perfect
Most Google apps have a similar minimalist style, but Google Arts & Culture takes a different approach with its cluttered interface. Perhaps it's due to the sheer volume of information displayed, but navigating the app has a steep learning curve, mainly because of the numerous tabs and submenus within menus. There is also a significant discrepancy in the amount of information displayed for each image, with some tabs providing in-depth details and others barely scratching the surface.
Google Arts & Culture is packed with features, and I've highlighted the ones I use the most. Others, like Sport, History, and Science, aren't my cup of tea, but will surely have fans who enjoy them. I took it slow when sifting through the menus to find what I liked because the information became overwhelming in large doses. However, none of these are dealbreakers and haven't stopped me enjoying the app and expanding my knowledge of the world.
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At the time, to take a moral reading of Lolita was to be embarrassingly Victorian. It was to deny oneself the pleasure of Nabokov's language for no particular reason. Twenty years later, however, Patnoe's interpretation has picked up steam. It has become, for many readers, the dominant way to read Lolita: by understanding it as a book about the rape of a child, and Humbert as the monster who is trying to fool you. In this reading, the pleasure is a trap. Finding the pain under Lolita There's plenty of evidence within Lolita to suggest that we are meant to be looking beneath Humbert's playful sentences for the pain of Dolores Haze. Even as Humbert insists that it was Dolores who seduced him, he also tells us that Dolores finds her sexual encounters with Humphrey painful, that she cries every night when she thinks that he is asleep, that she hoards her allowance so that she can run away from him. (He steals it back from her, but she runs away from him regardless.) 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In the same interview, however, Nabokov vigorously disavowed any moral or didactic reading of his novels. It's hard to know for sure what he made of Humbert's fans as they multiplied across the decades. It wasn't until the mid-2010s that a Dolores-centric reading of Lolita finally began to gain more traction. Related The Great Awokening is transforming America In the New Republic in 2015, Ira Wells tracked the public's eagerness to read Lolita as the story of a sexually appealing young girl against the language that suggested Dolores's tragedy. 'The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the past 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape victim named Dolores became a dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality in contemporary America,' wrote Wells: 'It is the story of how a girl became a noun.' Probably the most high-profile of these essays came from the feminist critic Rebecca Solnit, in her 2015 LitHub essay 'Men Explain Lolita to Me.' 'A nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn't thought of that yet,' Solnit wrote. 'It is, and it's also a novel about a big old guy violating a spindly child over and over and over. Then she weeps.' How Lolita survived Me Too The new Lolita takes were becoming mainstream just around the time of the so-called Great Awokening, those days in the late Obama era when it felt urgent and necessary to explore how misogynistic ideologies were encoded into works of art and popular culture. Gamergate and the Fappening ricocheted around the internet. Then in 2017, Me Too exploded into popular consciousness, and Lolita became, abruptly, very urgent indeed. In novels and memoirs of that time, changing the way you read Lolita became a metaphor for changing the way you think about consent. Related Reading Lolita in the wake of the My Dark Vanessa controversy When Me Too went mainstream, America began to reconsider old love stories and jokes, wondering if they were really so funny and romantic after all. (Listen, me too.) Almost immediately, commenters on the right began to declare that the left had, just like those killjoy Victorians, gone too far, become too moralistic: that they were destroying art and eroticism alike out of a desire to keep the world sanitized and safe and — using a word that had become a pejorative rather suddenly — woke. Lolita became a chief exhibit in that argument. Me Too, these commenters declared, was going to come for Lolita, and the book would never have seen the light of day in contemporary publishing. 'What's different today is #MeToo and social media — you can organize outrage at the drop of a hat,' 'If Lolita was offered to me today, I'd never be able to get it past the acquisition team,' publisher Dan Franklin was quoted saying in The Spectator, 'a committee of 30-year-olds, who'd say, 'If you publish this book we will all resign.'' You can find Dolores's voice in its pages quite easily, once you start listening for her. When I look back on meditations on Lolita around this time, however, what I find are a few declarations that Lolita is a misogynistic novel; but a great deal more pieces by readers who went back to Lolita expecting to find it appalling, and instead found it holds up remarkably well. Many of the works of art that were allegedly 'canceled' by the excesses of the woke mob in the wake of Me Too are works whose essence changes entirely when you look at them as stories of sexual assault. If you go digging for the voices of the sexual assault victim in, say, Sixteen Candles, you find nothing. Lolita, however, rewards such a read. You can find Dolores's voice in its pages quite easily, once you start listening for her. 'Perhaps—and at Vegas odds—only Lolita can survive the new cultural revolution,' Caitlin Flanagan wrote in The Atlantic in 2018. 'No one will ever pick up that novel and issue a shocked report about its true contents; no feminist academic will make her reputation by revealing its oppressive nature. Its explicit subject is as abhorrent today as it was upon the book's publication 60-plus years ago.' What becomes much more difficult, in such a reading, is enjoying the music of Nabokov's prose without shame. Who's reading Lolita right? Since 2018, as the Me Too backlash has mounted, the culture war over Lolita has shifted once again. The question is not, now, over whether someone is trying to cancel Lolita. Instead, it's the same as the old one: How do you handle the pleasure of the novel, and how do you handle the horror? What is the correct way to like Lolita? In her 2021 essay collection The Devil's Treasure, Mary Gaitskill wrote defensively that she thought Lolita was about love, and that she was sure saying so would lead censorious readers to hurl her book across the room. 'I don't think it's ideal love, it's twisted love, but that doesn't mean it isn't love. Probably the majority of Americans who know of that book would say: 'Yes, in real life Humbert should go to jail, but he's obviously a fictional character and I'm interested to read about him,'' Gaitskill said to The Guardian. 'That seems simple, but for more intellectual people, or people who are loud on Twitter, I think it's become contentious.' In 2020, writer and comedian Jamie Loftus released her Lolita Podcast, an extensive deep dive into the cultural legacy of Lolita. A central part of Loftus's argument was that our culture had gotten Lolita fundamentally wrong by reading it as the story of the temptress Lolita instead of the victim Dolores. 'I'm now far more aggravated with how [Lolita] was presented to me than by the work itself,' Loftus said. 'For me, a close read of this work reveals that Nabokov is not glorifying the predator. I believe it's our culture that has.' Now, instead of fighting over who's Victorian and who's modern like they did in the 1950s, we seem to be fighting over who is alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive. Versions of this argument over how to read Lolita continue to play out on social media, where Redditors vigorously debate whether people who read the book as a love story are illiterate edgelords stuck in the past, or if people who read the book as a horror story are virtue-signaling social justice obsessives. The culture wars have a way of making everything they touch look the same. Now, instead of fighting over who's Victorian and who's modern like they did in the 1950s, we seem to be fighting over who is alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive, who is shrill and moralizing and who is unafraid of petty boundaries. The person who might be most helpful to us here is, of all people, Lionel Trilling. 'For me one of the attractions of Lolita is its ambiguity of tone … and its ambiguity of intention, its ability to arouse uneasiness, to throw the reader off balance, to require him to change his stance and shift his position and move on,' Trilling wrote, in the same 1958 essay in which he declared that Lolita is about love. 'Lolita gives us no chance to settle and sink roots. Perhaps it is the curious moral mobility it urges on us that accounts for its remarkable ability to represent certain aspects of American life.' Lolita was written by a Russian, but it is about America, the whole vast beautiful seedy map of it, which Humbert and Dolores criss-cross again and again over their horrible year together. It is Lolita's ability to change shape before our eyes, to shift, to mutate, to show us who we are in every era, that makes it such a purely American novel. The more we read Lolita, the more it has to show us about who we are.
