I found that the experience of searching for artworks on museum websites—for a moodboard, a starting point, a creative spark—was painfully difficult. Most search filters were basic. All of this masterful, timeless work is being buried by clunky interfaces and scattered data. Many institutions, frustratingly, make access to artworks inaccessible. For modern art, I understand why, but for historical archives and images, I believe those should be widely and freely available. The problem isn’t abundance. It’s architecture and access. The spaces where we discover art shape what we’re capable of discovering. A feed designed for addiction will never facilitate contemplation. A platform that treats a Vermeer the same as a meme will never teach your eye to see the difference. The internet has billions of images, multiplying by the second. Somewhere in that flood are the works that could change how you see—the painting that stops you mid-scroll, the photograph that names a feeling you couldn’t articulate, the sculpture that makes you reconsider everything you thought about form. But algorithms serve what’s popular, not what’s profound. Platforms optimize for engagement, not for seeing. More art is accessible than at any point in human history, and yet meaningful encounters with it have become rare. The limitations became obvious: there is no platform that allows people to search by feeling or mood. I learned that AI has vision capabilities, able to scan thousands of vector points and “read” an image. I tested it on museum artworks and found that most of the keywords used—moody, sad, joyful, regal, complex, sophisticated, opulent—were accurate. This sent me down the rabbit hole. Other than Google Arts and Culture, there is no platform that curates all of this timeless work through mood and emotion filters. I constantly complain about designers using the same shallow references. I complain that in the age of AI, we are losing connection to the bodies of work that informed, pushed, and changed cultures and genres. When I worked at an agency, all of our work started in a library that had over 4,000 books—from science fiction to poetry to photography and beyond. It showed up in the work, making it fresh. I always push my designers to go to the library and get off platforms like Pinterest and Behance. Nothing wrong with them, they can be useful, but only living in those places yields recycled inspiration. 10M currently houses over 120,000 artworks form 18 museums and institutions around the world. 95% are in the public domain. A small percentage of famous artworks from The Whitney and MoMA are on display, but only for viewing. You can download any public-domain artworks from other museums at the highest resolution available. I created a feed view, a 3D globe view, and a timeline view that takes you through notable artworks from each era. And I plan to expand further.

10M

Art Discovery Engine | 110,000+ Public Domain Works

Art Discovery Engine | 110,000+ Public Domain Works