Art.sy will be a way to personalize and present art to a wide audience.
What does Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, Twitter’s creator Jack Dorsey and Rupert Murdoch’s wife have in common? They have all become financial backers for the most nonexclusive online art gallery in the world.
Founded by 24-year-old Cleveland Carter, a computer science major at Princeton, Art.sy will attempt to connect art galleries all over the world to provide not just a database but a database personalized to your taste. The website is attempting to do for fine art what Pandora did for music.
Unfortunately Art.sy, which is still in it’s “beta” form, is only taking requests for invitations to the site rather than simply signing up and instantly gaining access, which the company says has more to do with site development than exclusivity.
Once one is granted Art.sy’s coveted invitation, the site works simply. You just type in a name of an artist that you like such as Jackson Pollack or Norman Rockwell along with a price and a slew of similar artists are aggregated instantly.
Art.sy uses a new technology they are calling the “art genome” to help serve up a personalized fine art experience. If “art genome” sounds surprisingly similar to Pandora’s “music genome” it is because it was created by Cleveland Carter along with the Pandora’s CEO Joe Kennedy.
For budding artists, breaking into the art world is no easy task. Whereas music is becoming more open and accessible through torrent sites and social networking sites like Sound Cloud, fine art still remains exclusive and only for the hippest of the hip or the richest of the rich. Art.sy is an attempt to make a turn in a different direction. All of a sudden people will have instant access to unknown artists creating interesting work from all over the world. This is one of the first large-scale attempts to bring high-art to a wide market through exposure and social networking.
This fusion of technology and art is inevitable. With the recent collaboration of HP, YouTube and the Guggenheim getting 23,000 submissions from 91 countries for video art along with recently the Brooklyn open sources a large collection of their images it seems only a matter of time until art gets pushed into the forefront via the web. With all the high profile names attached to Art.sy already, this seems to be the strongest contender.
