"'What is' and 'what isn't' art is subjective. Hopefully ARTorNOT will offer insight to artists who would like to know what the internet thinks," co-creator Ryder Ripps tells us. "Like HOTorNOT, all that matters is if you know you're hot, the rating doesn't really matter...we all know who is and isn't hot...we would like to now discover if this applies to art."

ARTorNOT is a project of OKFoc.us, a company founded in September by New York-based creative technologist Jonathan Vingiano and artist Ryder Ripps.

ARTorNOT users sign up for the site with their Twitter accounts. Users click through photos and rate the "art" on a scale of 1-10, and then tweet those "artworks" out to the world.

Twitter, a more public-facing forum than Facebook, is a natural fit for ARTorNOT. This is one way it could become more accessible to a wider, non-Art World audience. ARTorNOT also utilizes a Twitter bot that grabs all searches for #artornot hashtag, and posts those to the app.

Does ARTorNOT have the potential to expand beyond the Art World? "I think an ARTorNOT API would be pretty funny," says Vingiano. "We may add integration with other social networks in the future."

If you're curious, add your own content to the site. Just don't be sad if the Internet decides that it's not art.

For the first experiment in looking, go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and then download the Google Goggles app for Android or iPhone. Snap a picture of the art that you're looking at. Goggles will pull up the work of art's history, bibliography of its creator and perhaps even a story of the collection from the Met's mobile-optimized website.

Goggles is only available at the Met and the Getty. If more art museums and galleries around the world index their collections with Google Goggles, smartphone users will be able to start building their own "virtual art collection" right on their smartphones.

The Metropolitian Museum of Art's Director, Thomas P. Campbell, told the New York Times that he saw the partnership with Google as "a milestone in our efforts to provide greater access to the museum's holdings for a global audience."

Google Goggles is essentially a visual search app, and could be especially useful for artists, arts writers, curators, gallerists and anyone else who is already searching visually. It can recognize art of people as art, but it cannot recognize pictures of people as people. Google says it has no plans to build face recognition into Goggles. It did, however, recently added opt-in facial recognition to its social network, Google+.

Tech-savvy art folks like our own Marshall Kirkpatrick have already started using tools like Foursquare Lists to build city-specific "guides for art lovers".

ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus did some snooping around on Google+, where you're most likely to find him, and discovered that some artists there are using circles to organize mini online art communities.

Another creative use of social media occurred when an earthquake hit New Zealand, effectively shutting the Christchurch Art Gallery down. The gallery stayed "open" online through blogging and website developments.

When Chinese artist Ai WeiWei was detained earlier this year, his NYC exhibition was unveiled with the help of social media even though he was still missing.

New iPhone apps like ArtSpotter aim to become the world's largest art database.

Arty meets social media pop culture on the Facebook profile of New York Magazine art critic and BRAVO Work of Art Judge Jerry Saltz. Go for the good conversation with *real* artists, stay for the linkage and political commentary. You have to be a friend of Jerry first, though.

Images via http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/plastic-bag, Jerry Saltz's Facebook Wall and some cat site on the Internet.

How have Goggles, smartphones, apps, social networks, geo-location social networks and Facebook change the way you see and interact with art?

A few years ago, I worked at an art gallery in Chicago. Ann Nathan Gallery, to be exact. Ann was a seasoned gallerist who knew practically everyone in the Chicago art community. Collectors would stroll in, stand in front of huge 4' x 5' paintings of the Chicago cityscape, and shake their head "yes." Then came the hard part: Trying to visualize how that piece would look on the wall of their home. The collector, of course, would come into the gallery with an idea of how much space he or she had, but buying it on-the-spot was pretty risky. So, the gallery's art handlers would take a trip to the collector's home with the not-yet-purchased work and place it. If the collector approved and decided to buy, the work could stay. If not, it would go right back.

While this extra trip demonstrates the utmost care and responsibility on the gallery's side, wouldn't it be great to envision how the piece looks without going to all that trouble?

Do you think Zazzle's Realview technology will ever come to the Art World? Give us your reactions in the comments.

One group of fans in London believe they've learned to use the app very well and they've gone from geographically nearby to each other, to having regular in-person meetups to what's now perhaps the next logical step: their own gallery art show. Here at ReadWriteWeb we love democratized publishing online and we love art, so we had to take a look at MyWorldShared - a gallery show of Instagram photos that opens in London on October 22nd.

Instead of postcards from exotic far-away places though, Instagram photos are often taken from right nearby your home. You've always got your phone on you. If you see something visually interesting - why not record it in a snapshot? It's an interesting intersection of ideas: Unusual sights, but in the usual places, perhaps with a slight tweak of a color filter and often of things that other people pass by regularly. It's a system of visual interpretation that anyone (who has an iPhone) can participate in.

Is this some kind of symbol of today's celebration of mediocre, unconsidered, shallow, frivolously decorated amateur art? Not if it's curated well! If most of the content on Instagram brings joy to no one but the people who post it - so be it. But the large body of images that the app makes easy to create are clearly leading to some great photos.

Why not put the best of it in a gallery? There are certainly Instagram users here in my home town of Portland whose work I would enjoy seeing printed large and on a wall.

I don't know if MyWorldShared is the first Instagram art show but I'm sure it won't be the last.

The show also got a write-up by Josh Wolford at WebProNews, who writes about his love of Instagram frequently. I found out about it from Ricky Yean of Crowdbooster.

On Canvas, users can upload images, edit directly in the browser and add captions. Once published, they can be remixed and commented on by other users. The site employs a badge-like system of stickers, which can be applied to images as a way of casting a vote. Drag the "LOL" sticker onto an image you thought was funny. Or you can give a cookie sticker to images that "need a little condescending acknowledgement." Stickers contribute to aggregate totals and help determine each image's overall popularity and placement.

The interface is highly interactive and easy to use. Voting for (or against) images is done via dragging and dropping icons, as is the assigning of stickers. The images themselves can be modified within the browser using basic image-editing interface that even includes a Photoshop-style "clone" tool.

Unlike 4chan, Canvas's content will be archived indefinitely. Images are grouped into categories, such as politics, photography, cute and funny. There's even a tab dedicated entirely to animated GIFs.

Canvas has received funding from a few notable sources, including Union Square Ventures, SV Angel and Andreeson Horowitz.

I heartily agree and can point to one example of an art museum that is actually doing this, albeit because they were forced to. The Christchurch Art Gallery has been closed to the public since the big February earthquake. That prompted the gallery staff to utilize their blog more, to keep the art gallery 'open' at least in an online way.

Acting Director Blair Jackson wrote in June about the increased Web activities of the Christchurch Art Gallery:

"Among the projects we're working on are some exciting website developments, which will not only allow us to better present online exhibitions, but will allow you to curate, save and share shows. We're also developing our mobile-web capabilities to keep us at the forefront of new technology use by galleries. And we've really got stuck into the blogging, pouring out tons of new content and commentary to keep art on all of our minds."

Other art museums and galleries around the world are fortunate to still have an offline presence, but they can learn a lot from the Christchurch Art Gallery in regards to using the Web to highlight art works, tell stories and engage with their community.

Got a favorite example of an art museum or gallery using social media? Let us know in our comments.

The good people at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon found themselves in just such a situation and have leveraged an interesting new mobile publishing platform in order to capture some of the value of place-based digital content in order to share it with their patrons.

The new Portland Art Museum iPhone app is built on top of a platform called Meridian, by a company called Spotlight Mobile. The platform provides content and venue owners a super-simple graphic user interface to upload digital assets, input text and other information and then click to associate those assets with a very particular place in a particular room on a map.

While publishing, users are encouraged to recite with a dramatic flair and a magician's voice the words, "art history, from around the world...get into this phone!" (Just kidding - but it is something magical, is it not?)

As you might imagine, the app lets you select your location or key in an exhibit number and then enjoy the digital assets on your phone, in some cases a video or audio lecture about a particular piece of art - in other cases simply more text content than is displayed off-line. The museum will roll out a new section of the app for the historic auto show beginning today. Spotlight says that Android versions of its apps will be launching in the coming weeks.

A user's location isn't automatically detected in this app, though Spotlight Mobile says that it does just that at the American Natural History Museum in New York through a technology partnership with CISCO.

In addition to media assets, the app also offers maps and will soon offer dynamic directions to get from one part of a venue to another.

The best part of all this of course is the Content Management System. Just as blogging democratized the world of text publishing beyond the technical elite who practiced it first online, and sites like Flickr and YouTube made media publishing easy - Meridian falls into the same class of technologies by making it drop-dead simple for anyone to publish their content in an app format and tie it to very specific places. That's very cool.

The question this raises, then, is: so how much content can I as a patron get about the art I'm standing in front of? Unfortunately, in the case of the Portland Art Museum - not very much. Art snobs often turn their nose up at the Portland collection (I live in Portland and think they are wrong - I like it quite a bit) but this technology snob (?) has to say that the mobile offering is far too sparse today. If the dream is of standing in front of any piece in the museum and learning more about it, of peeking through your phone into another dimension where the art's history and context stand clearly visible around it - that remains a dream for now. How many pieces in the Portland Art Museum's permanent collection have media available on this app? I hesitate to even say it explicitly, but it's...eleven. Ouch.

Of course anyone else who's jumped into the new world of democratized publishing online knows that when it's said these technologies make it easy - that just means it's easy to click a button and have content go live. That doesn't make it any easier to find the time, inspiration and skill to actually produce the content that will then be published.

I used to stand in front of works of art at the museum and suspect that the museum itself had a whole treasure trove of additional information about what I was looking at, beyond what was posted on the wall. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe they do and it's just not in a friendly format.

The end result is an experience that's promising but for now a little disappointing. Hopefully a lot more content will be created and published over time. I suspect there is a lot more information about much of this art out on the internet - perhaps if there was a way to efficiently vet and build on it then all of this would be made easier.

Such is one of the key challenges of our time, though. Now that anyone can publish - what will you say? How will you do it? Placing that challenge of media transformation and newfound ease in the context of mobile and specific location, especially for venerable institutions like art museums, is a very interesting prospect.

However, there's been no comparable recommendation engine for works of art. If you like a particular Henri Matisse painting, there hasn't been a website for you to visit that will suggest other works by the artist or that will recommend other artists altogether.

But that's the aim of ArtFinder, a London-based startup that wants to help make it easier for people to find art that they love. Or rather, that's part of the aim.

A Last.fm, Shazam, Songkick, IMDb for Artwork

ArtFinder doesn't just offer a Last.fm-like recommendation engine, suggesting, for example, Paul Signac if you like Henri Matisse. It also offers an IMDb-like database of artwork and artists, displaying biographies and images. There are details where you can find a particular piece on display (that would be a Songkick-like feature, I suppose), and there's also a Shazam-like image recognition capability, so that you can snap a photo and get an ID and more information about a piece of art.

It's an ambitious undertaking, one that has to tackle the fact that a lot of galleries' and museums' art is not yet digitized and much of it restricted from being displayed online due to copyright and licensing restrictions. But that makes it all the more important as artwork is stuck in siloes - both offline and online - that make it inaccessible. The result isn't simply that many people think that art is "not for them," says co-founder Chris Thorpe. Art history books and curation efforts often assume a lot of knowledge, something that "puts people off" from discovering the art they love.

Helping Galleries, Museums, and Artists Build Apps

It isn't just a problem for art appreciation. It's a problem for museums and galleries, and it's certainly a problem for artists themselves. ArtFinder wants to be able to help people discover not just a love for Matisse, for example, but for contemporary artists who want to be able to sell their artwork.

ArtFinder is also helping museums and galleries build their own mobile apps, with a Wordpress-like platform meant to be easy for institutions to make their catalogs and digital assets available to visitors. This is where the image-recognition tool will be incredibly useful too - much to the chagrin, no doubt, of the docents who like to tell visitors to put their cameras away.

The first four of these apps are available now in the iTunes store: Cass Biomorphia, Cass Breaking The Mould 1 and Cass Breaking The Mould 2, and Watteau at the Wallace Collection.

Thorpe says that, until now, "we've never really had the right device" to bring artwork out of the galleries or out of the art imprints. But with the screen resolution offered on the iPad and on other tablets, you can now zoom into work to see the digital equivalent of the brushstrokes of a particular piece of painting.

Bringing this digital technology to the art world is an incredibly important endeavor when it comes to discovery, preservation, and commerce. Likening the process to the compilation album, Thorpe says that by building apps that showcase different "hits" from a particular collection, that the art world will hopefully be able to drive the equivalent of album sales - not just selling paintings and sculptures, but creating new art fans.

Portland, Oregon is known for many things but one of them is its availability of public data. When the local government included listings of 429 pieces of public art in the data it made available to independent developers, Matt Blair took the logical and admirable step of turning that data into an iPhone app. The Portland Public Art Finder makes it easy to discover and learn about murals, sculptures, installations and other instances of art that you can go and enjoy in public.

It's a great way to learn about those works of art you might see regularly but never know the story behind, or to discover new gems in your or a new neighborhood. Blair told Mike Rogoway of the Portland Oregonian, who wrote about the app first, that he had no idea how much art was around town before seeing the data made available. Talk about augmented reality! What city wouldn't benefit from apps like this?

It's not hard to imagine integration of check-in apps, Wikipedia links, public commenting and shared discussion of works of art, their meaning and history. So much is made possible when geocoded data becomes programmatically available.

Wireless communication channels are all around us all the time, but their variable strengths in different places create a textured, invisible part of the urban landscape. A team of Norwegian researchers, arguing that WiFi is "a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities," created the beautiful video below visualizing the strength of WiFi signals around their neighborhood in Oslo. They used a four meter pole that measured signal strength and lit up to a great or lesser degree. Then they took time delayed photos of themselves walking through the snowy streets.

"The strength, consistency and reach of the network says something about the built environment where it is set up, as well as reflecting the size and status of the host," writes the team in Immaterials: Light painting WiFi "Small, domestic networks in old apartment buildings flow into the streets in different ways than the networks of large institutions. Dense residential areas have more, but shorter range networks than parks and campuses."

Thanks to Flowing Data for blogging about it first.

Watz will spend his residency working on art for a forthcoming show in Oslo and says that as part of his work "I will be developing a new Processing library for 3D model building, to be released as Open Source along with a series of models I'll publish on Thingiverse (see thingiverse.com/watz) in the MakerBot spirit of openness." MakerBot says its next Artist in Residence has already been selected and artists interested in applying for subsequent openings should apply now.

The MakerBot is exciting because it represents a democratization of physical manufacturing. The Artist in Residency program is exciting because it offers an opportunity to see what an artist, a specialist, dedicated and with unlimited resources, can do with the platform.

Imagine what could happen if your enjoyment of art was augmented further by the kinds of social technologies that you already use on the internet. Thousands of visitors to the STRP art festival in Eindhoven, Holland this Fall got to experience exactly that. The festival's creative integration of its existing art exhibits with Twitter, Facebook, a recommendation engine, a print-on-demand service, tag clouds and RFID chips might represent the kind of experience that art lovers everywhere may be able to enjoy elsewhere soon. If life imitates art, such technologies could bust out of the museums and enter into the rest of our cities sooner than we think.

Prior to entering the festival, attendees were encouraged to fill out online profiles describing themselves and, if they like, signing in with their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Then when they arrived, they were given Radio Frequency Identification chips (RFID) in a variety of different formats (badges, bracelets or their municipal services card) that they logged-in to associate with the online accounts they'd created.

Inside the part of the festival that included an art show, the attendees were able to visit any of 37 kiosks that could read their RFID chips and recognize who they were.

They were then asked about particular pieces of art they had just viewed. How would they describe each one? How would they rate their appreciation of the pieces of art?

If attendees had signed in with their Twitter or Facebook accounts, their reviews could be published immediately out to the web and shared with friends. Have you seen van Gogh's Starry Night at the New York MoMA? It's surrounded by people waving cell phone cameras at it all the time. Could we just skip that part and publish a picture, along with our responses, out to Facebook? Personal annotation, in an existing social context. Ought that not be every bit as much an option while standing in front of a beautiful painting, or river or tree, as it is when reading an article on a website you've visited?

After describing each work, the kiosks showed attendees a tag cloud of the most frequently used words used by other people to describe the same works. Perhaps you've experienced a work in an unusual way, or hadn't considered a particular emotion or theme that other viewers had experienced when looking at the same work. Wouldn't that be informative to learn?

Pandora for art. Depending on which pieces they rated the highest, the kiosks also offered attendees personalized recommendations of other pieces they would likely enjoy and should make sure not to miss. That's very cool. (MIT Media Lab does something similar, recommending exhibits based on your past experiences at the Lab.)

The more art an attendee rated, the more likely they became to win a graphic badge displayed on the profiles of top participants.

Walking throughout the exhibit were festival staff members with RFID scanners, netbooks and digital cameras. Attendees could have their cards scanned, their photos taken and then purchase a personalized photo book printed to commemorate the event.

"Many of the STRP attendees are high-school kids, and they think [RFID] is really cool," Ties van de Werff, a curator of the event, told RFID Journal. "To them, it's an extension of the Web."

What do you think of this kind of technology being involved in the world of art? If you think it could enrich the experience without too great a cost in attention and engagement, perhaps you can imagine this kind of experience extending beyond the museum and into our everyday lives.

IPad art browsing app Art Authority (iTunes link) has added several new features that make this little treasure all the more enjoyable: the masterpiece shuffle and favorites. One of the iTunes staff favorite apps, Art Authority looks a little clunky on the outside, but now lets you enjoy more than 50,000 great works of visual art. The vast majority of the pieces are paintings and from the Western canon. Full screen viewing of public domain works around the web and one-click launch of Wikipedia articles about the artists make this a great example of a simple interface as a big value add.

Art Authority sells for $9.99 (less than a single admission to most great museums) and is one of the apps I launch on my iPad the most. The navigation still leaves something to be desired, but any time spent complaining about that would be better spent appreciating the centuries of inspired examination of more substantial matters contained within.

I've got codes for free downloads for the first 10 people who email me at marshall@readwriteweb.com with the subject line "Art Authority" and some description of their favorite art form or experience. (My favorite art form is ceramics. My favorite places to enjoy it have been the Portland Craft Museum, the Oregon Ceramics Showcase and the National Museum of Amsterdam.) Update: We're all out, real quick. You can still write and tell me what your favorite art experiences are, but maybe you should go drop a ten instead.

Built by 1980's Apple engineer Alan Oppenheimer and his company Open Door Networks, Art Authority is a beautiful way to get some art education and ponder the human condition. Who could ask for anything more?

See also: Tour the Art Institute of Chicago on Your iPad for $4

There's something counter-intuitive about DeviantART, a community filled with dark and brooding illustrations among other works, entering the world of stock photography, typically a world of empty-eyed smiles and imagery that's inoffensive to a fault. Reader comments on the DeviantART blog post about the news are positive so far, though.

Stephen Shankland reported this morning that DeviantART "wants to launch special collections for those who want a more flavorful departure from traditional microstock imagery."

Though ten years old, DeviantART continues to blaze new trails. This Summer the company released an HTML5 painting app that works well on the iPad, for example.

The site says its users consume a substantial amount of stock photography itself, and this partnership will also facilitate that. It will be interesting, though, to see how the introduction of small-scale commercialization impacts the culture of one of the web's largest sites for artists.

And now that object can decorate your computer or even your walls, thanks to new Twitter art from Lu herself.

Prices start at $14.95 for the laptop-sized graphics and go up to $149.95 for the giant wall art.

In a recent interview with the artist on the LTLprints blog, it's mentioned that Shanghai-born Lu has also done creative work for Anna Sui New York, Maybelline, GettyImages, Glam Media, JWT, the Surfrider Foundation, the University of Technology Sydney, McCann World Group and LTLPrints itself. However, for many of us tech geeks, none is more memorable than that of the Fail Whale.