Results of a ColorSearch query for green artworks (all screenshots by Benjamin Sutton for Hyperallergic)
Collectors choose to buy art based on their interest in the work itself, not whether it matches the color of their living room drapes, right? Not always, as Alexandra Chemla, the founder of ArtBinder — a digital platform for showing showing and selling art — knows well. The idea that art collectors, interior designers, and consultants would use a tool that lets them flip through thousands of artworks sorted by dominant color schemes inspired the newest tool added to ArtBinder, ColorSearch.
Launched this week, ColorSearch is only the latest in a slew of new technologies that are changing the way we find, view, buy, and sell works of art — and, by extension, changing the way we understand the purpose, meaning, and value of art in the digital age. Instead of filtering works by artist, period, movement, style, or any of the other usual categories, ColorSearch uses a color-detecting algorithm to let users sort gallery databases by palettes. Select one or a combination of 200 hues from a grid, and ColorSearch combs through the database from hundreds of galleries affiliated with ArtBinder to present those that match the chosen hue. Users can then request information from galleries about specific works.
Results of a ColorSearch query for blue and yellow artworks
This particular app seems to reduce art to decoration, enabling people go about choosing artworks in much the same way they might picking wallpaper or a new sofa. But it also seems like an inevitable development in a highly commercialized and increasingly digitized art industry, in which thumbnails of paintings are often crammed together on a small screen, making it harder to pay attention to the meaning and context surrounding each one. Presented in an online format, artworks often seem diluted to a checkerboard of Pantone chips, so that a work’s color is likely one of the first things that catches an online art browser’s eye. ArtBinder’s founder argues that they developed the tool in response to approaches to buying art that are already widespread, thereby filling a need in the industry.
Art-as-decor implications aside, ColorSearch has some unintended cool aspects. It lets you easily compare the different ways various artists use and combine the same colors in their work, and lets you explore what a shared color scheme might mean about the similarities in various artworks’ moods, subject matters, and styles. After a while, the tool starts to feel like an online game for color theory nerds.
The Latest
Bobby Wilson Combats Indigenous Stereotypes Through Humor
The artist-performer’s career undulates, ever so gracefully, across multiple mediums and registers of generational pain, healing laughter, and Indigenous joy.
Rare 19th-Century Silhouette Album’s Secrets Unlocked
Traveling portrait artist William Bache’s album depicts famous figures like Thomas Jefferson as well as people whose identity was previously unknown.
Nevada Museum of Art Presents Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity
For the first time in nearly 60 years, the innovative yet under-recognized artist is the subject of a retrospective exhibition. On view in Reno, Nevada.
Artists Show What They Can Do With a Google Phone’s Camera
Works by 20 photographers are now on view in Manhattan for the seventh season and 100th project coming out of the Google Creator Labs.
Met Museum Kicked Me Out for Praying to My Ancestral Gods
My danced prayer to looted Cambodian antiquities was too much for the New York museum.
The Public Theater in NYC Presents Plays for the Plague Year
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’s theatrical concert chronicles the 2020 lockdown and the hope and perseverance that emerged from it.
A Museum Guard’s Ode to the Healing Power of Art
In All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley revisits the many ways that art meets life, and life art, and how death is often the bridge between them.
UK Extends Export Ban on Coveted “Portrait of Omai”
London’s National Portrait Gallery was given a few months to acquire the work, which depicts the first Polynesian visitor to the UK.
Mondays at Pratt Institute: Weekly Openings of Work by Graduating Artists
Free and open to the public, Pratt Shows celebrate the school’s graduating students. MFA and BFA work on view this spring in Brooklyn, New York.
The Sculptor Making Art With Loved Ones’ Ashes
Inspired by the three-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, Julian Stair’s exhibition honors the lives of eight people with cinerary jars.
Art Institute of Chicago Under Scrutiny Over Sacred Nepali Necklace
The 17th-century object remains on display at the Chicago museum despite Nepal’s calls for repatriation.
LSU School of Art Grants Highest MFA Stipends in the Southern US
With funded assistantships, full tuition waivers, and generous stipends, Louisiana State University helps students lay the groundwork for a successful lifelong art practice.
Art Problems: How Do I Get a Public Art Commission?
Want to leave a mark on your city or town, but don’t know where to start? Paddy Johnson has some tips.
Rose B. Simpson Embeds Ancestral Histories in Clay
She has taken clay and used it to recall its ancestral roots in Pueblo culture and address the present history of postcolonial recovery and ongoing trauma.