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The fine art world has been notoriously slow to adapt to the Web.  Shopping and viewing fine art is much now like it always has been: you go to a gallery or museum based on what you've read about the exhibition or institution and continue this process to your hearts content.  If blessed with god fortunes and better connections, you might be lucky enough to purchase these high-priceds items.  Where one goes to purchase a mid-high range piece of art (five figures and above)? A gallery or an auction house is pretty much your option, leaving what art and whom it is sold to fairly discretionary and limited. 

By Wired's estimate, only baout 4% of the $60 billion fine art industry takes place online.  Compared to other cultural entities... Music? Books? That's nothing. 

Carter Cleveland is attempting to break the stuffy and traditional methods of viewing and purchasing art via the "Art Genome Project".  His website, Art.sy, brings users to a straightforward experience based on search, suggestions, filters and user preferences.   Sound familiar yet? Pandora for art.

The organizing system for the work on Art.sy gives the user the chance to whimsically view works from galleries and institutions all over the world on their computer.  The service shows art in a pleasing web of visuals for endless browsing pleasure, and if you have a lot of money to spend, you can buy the work too. 

Each piece and artist has "genes".  For more than 800 genes, that piece or artist has a value on a scale of 1-100.  Based on these values, artwork is magically related.  Sound like a clunky backend? It is.  This is straight-up categorization.  From that human hand, the software is trained to mimic the human interpretation of that artwork.  Despite this strenuous process, Art.sy's site is successfully connecting viewers to artwork more efficiently than ever before.  That efficiency can lead to one bottom-line: sales.

As this service gets  bigger, will Art.sy run into the same problem as Pandora? How can Art.sy merge existing data? Will it have to recruit an army of art historians to tag the images? What if there are inconsistencies? How reliable will their recommendations be? 

What technology attempts to do, whether successfully or not, is open up the world and connect the things in it. As a fairly closed industry, the art world has yet to embrace the Web.  How we program a computer to taste remains extremely unnerving to gallerists and artists alike aside from the huge technological hurdles.  The genius behind Art.sy, though, is that it allows the user to breathe.  It's not pushy, but is giving rise to a truly global art market where anyone, anywhere can view an purchase a piece of pricy fine art. 

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_artsy/all/