Museums Supply Images to Online ‘Art Genome Project’
October 9, 2012 | Read Time: 1 minute
More than 300 museums, galleries, and nonprofit institutions are collaborating on a massive project to digitize some of the world’s finest art and make it available online, according to The New York Times.
The Art Genome Project, for which images of these organizations’ art holdings are being collected, is at the core of Art.sy, an Internet start-up that went live Monday. Art.sy seeks to become for art lovers what the site Pandora is for music fans: The program uses digital analytics to predict which pieces of art users will want to see, based on what they have already expressed a preference for.
Art.sy’s digital collection, which so far includes 20,000 pieces, includes works from the National Gallery in Washington, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York, among others. Seb Chan, the Cooper-Hewitt’s director of digital and emerging media, says Art.sy and its ilk are not intended to replace brick-and-mortar museums.
“You go to museums and you browse—chancing upon things is what it’s all about,” he says. “The Art Genome is another way of creating serendipitous connections.”
