Discover your fortune with this art-themed Tarot deck

Tarot cards weren't made for fortune telling

Tarot cards appear to be everywhere today, but their story starts not with fortune-telling, but with a card game for nobles in 15th-century Italy.

Meet the psychologist who reads people through the art they live with

Dimitrios Tsivrikos, an academic psychologist at University College London, says the art someone hangs in their home reveals as much about them as a bookshelf would. He advises going on a first date at a museum and asking each other about the work on the walls.

Twelve artworks you'll love zooming into

Zoom in on these famous paintings to see what's hiding up close, then go exploring the rest of Google's incredible Arts and Culture hub.

Lunar New Year has a rich tradition of visual symbolism

Explore centuries of art related to the holiday—from the dragon robes worn by royalty to the calligraphy symbols thought to bring prosperity and fortune. Ancient artistic practices like woodblock printing, painting, and dance weave together to create the visual language of the Lunar New Year.

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

Play a game that reveals if investors with a crystal ball make better trades

The "crystal ball" game reveals how well you would do trading stocks and bonds if you could see the front page of the Wall Street Journal one day in advance.

Exploring the link between history, art, and anatomy

Throughout centuries, art has played a vital role in sharing—and furthering—scientific understanding. This largely began in 1543 when physician Andreas Vesalius worked with an artist and engraver to transform learnings from his dissections into...

In 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre and reached a new level of celebrity

One man carried out the crime relatively easily thanks to minimal security at the time. A former Louvre employee, he hid in a storage closet and swiped the painting the following morning. The disappearance caused a national stir, and people paid to come see the empty spot on the wall. The masterpiece was eventually returned in 1914.

Bellagio hotel sells Picasso artwork

Eleven Picasso paintings and other works that helped turn Las Vegas into an unlikely destination for art were sold at auction for more than $100 million.

The bestselling visual art mediums, visualized

Fine art is a particularly appealing alternative investment for many—but it's also a pretty broad term. This data visualization shows which fine art mediums sold the best in 2024. For instance, paintings accounted for about 59% of all fine art dealer sales that year, whereas sculptures accounted for roughly 15%. See the full picture here.

The history of iconic pigments used in seven famous paintings

While art paints can be bought by the bucket at any craft store today, pigments throughout history have been difficult to come by. Art historian Kelly Grovier traces the fascinating history of pigments that make up hidden layers in masterpieces from Picasso and Hokusai’s Prussian Blue to Vermeer’s shade of red.

At their peak, some believed NFT royalties could create a new income source for artists

Non-fungible tokens’ role in the art world is evolving with experiments such as automated NFT royalties that generate income when an NFT is resold.

A list of one guy's hundreds of fortune cookie fortunes

Simple idea: Eat lots of Chinese food, collect wisdom in the form of fortunes. Josh Madison held onto hundreds of these and lists them here, noting the ones he received more than once with a number.

Play a game inspired by Aztec and Mayan mythology

This free online game, Descent of the Serpent, guides players through Mesoamerican myths as they challenge the god Tezcatlipoca. Along the way, it introduces monuments and artifacts with short explanations of their meaning in Aztec and Mayan cultures.

The Louvre in Paris has its own particle accelerator for art analysis

The Accélérateur Grand Louvre d'analyse élémentaire serves as a noninvasive tool for identifying and quantifying trace elements present in artworks by analyzing how particles backscatter off targets. This information can help detect forgeries and determine a piece's provenance. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Play the Royal Game of Ur, one of the world's oldest known board games.

Pretend to be an AI chatbot and answer real prompts

This site, which allows people to answer prompts in real time, has millions of visitors. Join the crowd of people tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. You can ask questions, answer questions, and draw for each other.

Raphael's 'School of Athens' visually contrasts the views of Plato and Aristotle

As part of a commission from Pope Julius II to decorate his private library (and while Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel), Raphael created four frescoes representing different branches of knowledge: theology, philosophy, law, and poetry. "The School of Athens" depicted philosophy, staging classic thinkers Plato and Aristotle alongside others from intellectual history.

Board games can improve life satisfaction and coping self-efficacy

They provide distraction, foster self-determination, and promote personal transformation. Purposeful engagement with games builds the capacity to face real-life problems.

See these 16 pieces of art evoking phobias of snakes, flying, spiders, and more. 

This site reaches millions of visitors who are tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. Pretend to be an AI chatbot and ask questions, provide answers, and draw for people in real time.

Mini-portraits were shared as love tokens in Elizabethan England

Art historians are identifying previously unknown works by Nicholas Hilliard, Elizabeth I's court painter, whose thumb-sized watercolors on vellum served as love tokens, diplomatic currency, and status symbols. They were believed to be passed secretly between courtiers and monarchs.

Experience games that explore Nobel Prize-winning work

Inspired by the educators who set laureates on their path, the Nobel Foundation has created a library of interactive activities for the general public. These allow users to make groundbreaking discoveries, showing that such work is accessible to all.

Explore the metaverse with this mind map

The metaverse is a complex concept that involves interlocking and rapidly evolving parts, including Web3, augmented reality, and trademark law. It's easy to get overwhelmed when faced with the new legal, financial, ethical, and creative intersections of our reality and its virtual echo. This mind map details the metaverse and its implications for various fields that interact and overlap. Click through the map to read and listen to topic summaries or explore more in-depth resources.

Explore a timeline of Mary Cassatt's career

This collection from The Art Story situates Cassatt's major works chronologically and provides historical context, allowing you to see how her interactions with both the French Impressionists and Japanese printmaking influenced her work.

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide, thanks in part to the subjective nature of valuing a work of art.

Why does that bag look like a face?

If you've ever spotted a face hidden in an inanimate object, you've engaged in a timeless phenomenon known as pareidolia. This three-minute video explains why and how it happens.

The Canadian artist considered the 'Picasso of the North'

Norval Morrisseau's art is bold, with vivid colors and striking angles. His interviews were similar, with the artist often challenging the way questions were posed and his life was characterized, believing he was being unfairly pigeonholed as an Indigenous artist. This overview of Morisseau's work and life is a helpful primer on the artist, the perfect place to start before jumping into the deep end.

Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi creates masterpieces using Microsoft Excel

Upon retiring, he wanted to get into art, but found the materials to be expensive. Since 2000, he has created art pieces using the line tool and other features the software provides before printing and taping together various spreadsheets that make up a completed work.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free, selecting different income levels, high school experience, race, ethnicity, and more.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

Watch this video that uses Lego bricks to explain how venture capital works.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

Explore the history, structure, and species of Australia's Great Barrier Reef with this interactive journey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

The 1987 Nintendo video game 'Stadium Events' isn't known for being particularly fun, but its scarcity has made it a highly sought-after item that has sold for up to $35K at auction.

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

NBA superstar Victor Wembanyama spent the 2025 summer training with monks in central China to enhance his body and mind.