You don’t need to steal art from the Getty to have it at home. The museum is giving it away

The Getty is one of Southern California’s most renowned art museums, but for the past year there’s been another reason to love it.

Sure, you can peruse the artworks in person. But now you can also have a slice of that experience at home, or really anywhere.

Last year, the museum updated its collection to allow for thousands of pieces to be available for free — digitally. The Getty says the response has been striking, with about a half million downloads this year alone.

Why the art is being given away

Roughly 88,000 artworks are available under the Creative Commons Zero license, which puts the pieces in the public domain. That means you could put a Monet painting on your wall, or create your wedding invites with ancient mosaic images.

David Newbury, the Getty’s  senior director of public technologies, says the museum used to have its own license for years under its open content program, but the museum would get a lot of questions.

“What we learned was most people aren’t lawyers,” he said. “ [Creative Commons Zero] didn’t actually change what you could do with it, but it changed how easy it was for people to understand what you could do with them.”

The switch to Creative Commons Zero has driven a lot more interest. Newbury says Van Gogh’s “Irises” is the most popular image with 3,000 downloads this year, but people are using the entire collection too. Animal pictures, for example, are another favorite.

How to get the free art

Van Gogh's "Irises."

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Courtesy the Getty Museum

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The Getty’s downloadable artworks can be found on the museum’s website. Use keywords in the search bar to get started, like an artist’s name or “flowers.” Then, make sure the “open content” filter is selected. Images in the public domain will show a download button with high-resolution sizing.

“ I hang out in museum circles and one of the coolest things that I see pretty regularly is our images being used in other people’s slideshows,” Newbury said.

But you can do much more. The license means the Getty has dedicated a given artwork to the public domain. It becomes a resource for everyone, where you can do anything you want with it. That includes selling things, putting the images in movies, or using them for your own personal artwork.

Claude Monet's "Still Life with Flowers and Fruit"

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Courtesy the Getty Museum

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Newbury says you’re welcome to credit the Getty while using an image, but you aren’t required to. The only thing they ask is that you don’t pretend to be the museum or suggest it endorsed your work.

More content is coming to the program too. The Getty is currently working through millions of archive materials collected about artists over the years, like scrapbooks. Newbury says those will be made public if copyright rules allow.

“ We have something like 20 miles of archival shelving,” he said. “It’s a project of a generation.”