Face it, unless you painted the backdrop yourself, your #artselfie likely isn't a true original. With Art Now, an app by Screenlab, indexing robots that track trending art on Instagram will let you know just how unoriginal your self-portrait with Björk's Swan Dress is. What do robots say is the most Instagrammed art in New York, for instance? If you guessed van Gogh's Starry Night, it's probably because you either downloaded Art Now, or waited in line to take a picture in front of it.
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The robots behind the app monitor approximately 4,300 museums around the world. Then, the app's image processing algorithm detects and clusters the works, knitting in location data from Four Square's API and content from Instagram's API. “In this way we can show all user interactions on each unique artwork, calculate popular hashtags for an artwork, and filter out photos that don’t contain any artworks,” writes the team in their app’s “About” section. “The result is a rich, condensed and real-time index of all popular and commented artworks in museums and galleries worldwide, right now.”Currently, Art Now discovers 3,200 photos daily and groups them with the 128,000 already logged works. Since they began inputting data in October 2014, they report, Starry Night (at the Museum of Modern Art) has consistently remained the most popular. On an average day, they say, at least 105 photos of the work crop up.The Art Now team explains the app can be a new way to discover and explore the art world: "You can use Art Now to discover museums in New York, find where paintings by Edward Hopper are being exhibited, or explore new art work made with neon tubing. Among other things," they write on their site.
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