The Internet and social media have touched nearly every aspect of life in the developed world, and even in much of the developing world. Real time chats, photos and videos, links to online news items are all shared instantaneously with friends, colleagues and acquaintances across town and around the world. In this context, there is no surprise that art would be the next area to experience innovation at the hands of the Internet and social sharing. A browser-based platform called Curiator, presently in beta and invite-only status, allows you to create and share your own art gallery filled with photos of your favorite art pieces. Think of Curiator as Pinterest for art lovers.
What Is Art?
Chances are that unless you have deep pockets, you cannot afford to purchase all the artwork that you would like. Curiator steps in to address this issue by allowing users to share photos of artwork from a variety of sources. For instance, you may visit an exhibition in a museum, and take photos of particular pieces of artwork that you especially like. You may be an enthusiast of an up-and-coming artist, and follow his or her showings at art galleries. Art blogs, art books and gallery catalogs represent other potential sources of artwork for Curiator users to share. If you do have the financial means to purchase artwork from a brick-and-mortar art dealer or an online art portal, you may share photos of your own acquisitions through Curiator as well.
Your Public/Private Art Gallery
If you have cable Internet, DSL or some other high-speed Internet connection, you may already share photos of or links to online displays of artwork with friends and acquaintances on social networks such as Pinterest, Facebook or Tumblr. You may also have a catalogue of photos on your computer hard drive or stored on thumb drives, CDs, DVDs or external hard drives. However, it is often cumbersome and tedious to gather your artwork from various sources, either to view on your own or to share with others. Curiator provides a platform for you to gather and categorize photos of your favorite art pieces in one location in the cloud. You can sort your photos by artist or genre or follow the Curiator collections of fellow art enthusiasts whose tastes match with your own.
Share and Share Alike
As mentioned above, Curiator is presently in beta and invite-only status. However, once you have received an invitation, you sign up either through a Google+ account or through Facebook. You cannot use the service without going through one of these two portals. Readymade, the parent company of Curiator, does allow users the option to opt out of third-party advertising and product offerings.
In addition, unlike other services that utilize social networking portals, Curiator’s privacy policy states that the service will never post notices without your prior knowledge and permission. And in contrast to previous controversies surrounding intellectual property rights for Pinterest, Curiator spells out in plain language that users retain all intellectual property rights to items that they post, provided that they are the rightful copyright holders. On the other hand, copyright infringement is severely frowned upon.
Laura Spicer is an art collector. She loves to share her ideas for where to collect art on consumer blogs.
