Personal curation

As Amazon is for books, IMDB is for movies and Last.fm is for music, so Artfinder aims to be the only online destination you need for fine art. By partnering with a growing number of museums, galleries and artists worldwide, we are establishing a ‘home’ for fine art on the web, as well as on mobile phones and on tablet devices such as the iPad.

Creating a profile on the Artfinder website enables you to ‘collect’ your favourite artworks, and share them via Facebook, Twitter or email. As you learn what you like, we can recommend other artworks that suit your taste using our proprietary recommendation technology, and can also create ‘magic tours’ through artworks personalised to your preference. If you see a piece of art you especially like, you can also order a print or postcard of it. All of these social elements allow greater opportunity for works to be discovered, enjoyed and shared by a global audience.

Our searchable digital catalogue of paintings, sculptures and art-related media currently stands at 250,000 works, sourced from over 400 museums, galleries, libraries and institutions globally. We have much to offer the galleries, artists and museums that partner with us, in that we address one of the most pressing issues faced by arts management professionals: how to open up new revenue channels while continuing to broaden public access and raise awareness of collections and exhibitions in museums, galleries and studios.

As a visually rich digital publication – the digital version of a catalogue or high quality art book – an app can generate new revenues and/or be used as a global marketing tool, widening public access and awareness, showcasing ‘hidden treasures’ and helping consumers remember and share their favourite art works. We collaborate with museums, galleries and artists to develop their apps for free and split the revenues generated, so our app publishing programme for iPads and smartphones provides a clear way for our partners to create new revenues and experiment with new technologies at minimal cost and zero capital investment. The first Artfinder apps will be available later this month, including apps for The Cass Sculpture Foundation, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the V&A.

We also provide a channel for print-on-demand sales of posters and postcards, and later will do so for original art works. For this, we link up with a number of partners, including the museums themselves, and receive an affiliate fee from any sales generated off their websites and apps. We are also working on building an ‘image repository’ for newspapers, broadcasters, bloggers and others who want to license fine artworks from museums, galleries and picture libraries. Currently many images of fine art works that can be found on the web lack the metadata to help a user identify who, where and how to license this artwork. We are developing image recognition technologies that will enable users to match a work to its image repository database, and then find from whom and how to license an image.