Recommendation engines have changed the way we think about – and the way we purchase – music, movies, and books. Do you like the Beastie Boys’ new album? Then check out Danger Mouse’s latest. Do you like Guillermo del Toro films? Then be sure to watch Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s movies.
However, there’s been no comparable recommendation engine for works of art. If you like a particular Henri Matisse painting, there hasn’t been a website for you to visit that will suggest other works by the artist or that will recommend other artists altogether.
But that’s the aim of ArtFinder, a London-based startup that wants to help make it easier for people to find art that they love. Or rather, that’s part of the aim.
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A Last.fm, Shazam, Songkick, IMDb for Artwork
ArtFinder doesn’t just offer a Last.fm-like recommendation engine, suggesting, for example, Paul Signac if you like Henri Matisse. It also offers an IMDb-like database of artwork and artists, displaying biographies and images. There are details where you can find a particular piece on display (that would be a Songkick-like feature, I suppose), and there’s also a Shazam-like image recognition capability, so that you can snap a photo and get an ID and more information about a piece of art.
It’s an ambitious undertaking, one that has to tackle the fact that a lot of galleries’ and museums’ art is not yet digitized and much of it restricted from being displayed online due to copyright and licensing restrictions. But that makes it all the more important as artwork is stuck in siloes – both offline and online – that make it inaccessible. The result isn’t simply that many people think that art is “not for them,” says co-founder Chris Thorpe. Art history books and curation efforts often assume a lot of knowledge, something that “puts people off” from discovering the art they love.
Helping Galleries, Museums, and Artists Build Apps
It isn’t just a problem for art appreciation. It’s a problem for museums and galleries, and it’s certainly a problem for artists themselves. ArtFinder wants to be able to help people discover not just a love for Matisse, for example, but for contemporary artists who want to be able to sell their artwork.
ArtFinder is also helping museums and galleries build their own mobile apps, with a WordPress-like platform meant to be easy for institutions to make their catalogs and digital assets available to visitors. This is where the image-recognition tool will be incredibly useful too – much to the chagrin, no doubt, of the docents who like to tell visitors to put their cameras away.
The first four of these apps are available now in the iTunes store: Cass Biomorphia, Cass Breaking The Mould 1 and Cass Breaking The Mould 2, and Watteau at the Wallace Collection.
Thorpe says that, until now, “we’ve never really had the right device” to bring artwork out of the galleries or out of the art imprints. But with the screen resolution offered on the iPad and on other tablets, you can now zoom into work to see the digital equivalent of the brushstrokes of a particular piece of painting.
Bringing this digital technology to the art world is an incredibly important endeavor when it comes to discovery, preservation, and commerce. Likening the process to the compilation album, Thorpe says that by building apps that showcase different “hits” from a particular collection, that the art world will hopefully be able to drive the equivalent of album sales – not just selling paintings and sculptures, but creating new art fans.
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