{"id":7435,"date":"2015-12-09T23:24:14","date_gmt":"2015-12-10T04:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/artsy-finding-art-at-the-intersection-of-science-and-technology\/"},"modified":"2015-12-09T23:27:10","modified_gmt":"2015-12-10T04:27:10","slug":"artsy-finding-art-at-the-intersection-of-science-and-technology","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/artsy-finding-art-at-the-intersection-of-science-and-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"ARTSY: Finding Art at the Intersection of Science and Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artsy<\/a>\u2019s story began as most startup stories do: in a college dorm room. CEO Carter Cleveland launched Artsy in October 2012, when he\u2014a computer science major at Princeton\u2014couldn\u2019t find a website to discover artwork for his dorm room, so he set out to build one.<\/p>\n

In three years, Artsy has catalogued over 360,000 works of art from over 25,000 artists worldwide and secured $50 million of funding in the process. With Peter Thiel, Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on its bench of investors, it\u2019s no surprise that Artsy has been highly effective at aligning its operating and business models, but how exactly do they do it?<\/p>\n

THE ART GENOME PROJECT<\/strong><\/p>\n

Artsy\u2019s success is rooted in its ability to develop highly advanced technology and apply it to the art discovery and education process. Established as a collaboration between art historians and computer engineers, the Art Genome Project builds upon art-historical scholarship and artificial intelligence to codify the “DNA sequencing” of art. Specifically, Artsy\u2019s algorithms ascribe complex values to artwork using 1,000 different \u201cgene\u201d tags in fourteen different categories. Not only do these classifications range from subject matter to period or technique, but they also consider style and movement, even including a category for eye contact. Each artwork then gets assigned 25 genes on average, with each gene weighted according to relevance on a scale of 1 to 100.<\/p>\n

Beyond designing a search engine and database for art (a feat in and of itself), the genome system empowers Artsy to draw connections and map out relationships among works of art. This in turn led to the development of a Pandora\/Netflix-inspired recommendation engine that aids in the actual discovery<\/em> of art\u2014a clear pain point for artists and collectors.<\/p>\n

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OPERATING MODEL<\/strong><\/p>\n

As such, Artsy operates as a platform that connects and serves a two-sided marketplace.<\/p>\n

Value to Artists\/Galleries: <\/strong><\/p>\n