(really) nice site + curation, but what's the target audience? it seems like it's going to be too high priced / limited numbers for mass market sales? do you display prices to registered users? if not, how do you expect to filter large amounts of queries (i'm confused about the balance between wide audience and price / quality)? is the best way to see this as a portal to established (commercial) galleries (with a few "big" exhibits thrown in to keep it looking good)? if so, how do you plan to attract return visitors?

i know i asked similar questions here before, so apologies if this is to the same team. also, from that discussion, are you worried about people's reluctance to buy before seeing "for real"? maybe location filtering would be useful?

(finally, maybe just me, but i was (am?) confused by your use of "collection" and whether that meant creating on-line "favourites" or actually owning a piece of art).

oh, and this seems to be aimed at the us market, but op is italian

EDIT - the nyt link from cvursache answers much of this (i hadn't realise this was related to the art genome project)

Thanks for the feedback. Our goal is to make all the world's art freely accessible and so in the short-term we are more focused on building our database and the Art Genome Project than a particular audience. In the long-term we intend Art.sy to be a tool for collectors to more easily discover new artists and galleries, and more easily purchase art. This commercial activity will ensure that Art.sy remains free for the 99.9% of people out there who will never buy art, but don't currently have access to it, particularly lower income and rural demographics who live outside of major city centers.

The collection feature is just for saving your favorites. Although expect some major upgrades to that soon.

Also, I wouldn't be a good founder if I didn't mention that we are looking for interaction + visual designers (we believe in bringing both together), software engineers, and art world professionals:

art.sy/jobs

We're also really into open-source. You can check out our projects here: http://artsy.github.com/open-source/

er, I'm not the curator of this site. I just posted it because I find it interesting.

I'm a huge fan of art.sy. Even though I'll never be able to afford most of the art on the site, it is a great way to discover new artists. I also adore the design, they did a fantastic job of making it minimal but still modern (it's tiny stuff like the transition that happens when you click Browse). I like how this flat design aesthetic is evolving. Art.sy's design could be called "Metro", I suppose, but it looks nothing like Microsoft's designs.

If you're looking for JavaScript or Clojure engineers, I'm interested.

We are: http://art.sy/job/developer

Interesting site, but I found it hard to get in to a groove of stuff I found interesting.

The introduction to the site might work better if it followed a model like netflix where they always show new users some very popular stuff in different genres at the start so they can see the value of it.

That holds true for any content website, lead with your best foot to get engagement, and then lead people down the garden paths to see the obscura.

I love these guys. @dblockdotorg was nice enough to let me, my wife, and my CTO come check out General Assembly and their space while I was in New York earlier this year. Their code seems solid, I've happened upon stuff @dblock wrote when looking for solutions to something (grape-on-rack, some mongoid bits), and in general can't say enough nice things about this company. Congrats to them.

Thanks so much for the kind words :)

How are the Artists/pieces chosen?

The Art Genome Project blog explains how the artists/pieces are chosen http://theartgenomeproject.tumblr.com .

There's also a nice article on the NYTimes about how art.sy works: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/arts/design/artsy-is-mappi...

Congrats, you have a great site. Do you intend to add social features like a follow button not only for artists but also for collectors?

I believe it helped a lot http://theartstack.com/ getting users.

Great execution. I love how the site pops up from the bottom on the landing page and you can use it right away, that's an awesome idea for any kind of demo. I might just steal it for my own projects!

There's a blog post on 3d transforms here: http://artsy.github.com/blog/2012/10/18/so-you-want-to-do-a-...

There's also an awesome open-source project by a fellow NY dev here: https://github.com/hakimel/meny that accomplishes the same thing (we didn't use it because it's frame-based).

Urgh, that's the most gratuitous and ugly use of openGL I've seen so far.

Nice talk From Art'sy Director, Matt Israel, at DataGotham: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9X3_8te4hs

The "take me to artsy anyway" on the unsupported browser screen doesn't work. Just goes to the same unsupported browser page.

We set a cookie when you click that and don't redirect to the error when that happens. So two questions: 1) do you have cookies enabled 2) what's your browser?

Feel free to e-mail support@art.sy with this.

Invitations available here http://art.sy/fp5i3l

Seems to be completely broken on FF 16

Can you please drop a note to support[at]art.sy with what you see?

But it supports Syrian dictator. See

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/foreigners/2012/08/...