We were incredibly honoured today to be written about by Jonathan Jones in his very fine blog in The Guardian. He makes some really lovely points about what we’re trying to do and about some of the features we’ve been thinking about for a while now; Shuffle and the Magic Tour. We’re glad that thinking has paid off and is obvious to users and inherent in those parts of the site. He also makes some important points about image quality and size. The former we can work on and improve, as we always hope to, in the short term. Size relates to how museums and rights holders feel about images online and may take longer, although we hope that they will come to realise that permitting the use of slightly larger images on the web just lets art lovers discover things more easily.

There’s one thing we wanted to correct though and that is that we’re not an online museum. We’re a website. Museums are special, magical places and not all online things have to be an analogue of a real world thing. We’re proud to be a website, it’s what we always set out to be. There are points when we’ll do museum-like things. We’ll curate, juxtapose, hopefully inform, delight and convene. But these are things that websites can do too. What we hope to be is a website where related works from disparate museums can be brought together so you can find more art and artists that you love. We could spend all our time trying to replicate every minute facet of the museum experience in a virtual space, but that’s not the intention of Artfinder. The intention is to be a new way to find and collate and share the art you love and we feel the best vehicle for that is a website. There are other parts of the service that we’re working on at the moment where the best vehicle may either be an app on a smartphone, or an app on a tablet device. These won’t be analogues of museums either, they’ll be their own things, but essentially, they’ll be apps and we’ll be proud of that fact as well.