ArtShare

ArtShare is an application developed by the Brooklyn Museum to share the Museum's collection on Facebook. What can you do with ArtShare? Well, you can select works from the Brooklyn Museum collection to display on your profile. Recognizing that social networking is never one-sided, but rather an exchange of information between parties, we developed this application so any Museum could use it to share works in their own collections (27 museums to date); and so artists on Facebook (626 artists to date) could upload their own artwork to share with friends. ArtShare can be used to select a wide variety of works of art, then each time your profile is loaded a different work will be displayed at random from your selections. ArtShare functions just like everything else on Facebook, allowing the members of its community to get to know one another, but in this case through art. It allows users (art lovers, museum-goers, and others) to connect their profiles and personalities to works in museums' collections. ArtShare allows Facebook users to display their favorite paintings, photographs, and objects on their own terms and in their own social spaces. Browsing through Facebook users who have installed ArtShare, one begins to get a sense of the personal tastes and interests they have, just by looking at the works of art they've selected for their profiles.

The mission of the Brooklyn Museum is to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience, committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs, and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation, and presentation, the Museum aims to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts. Our mission carries forth from our Director, Arnold Lehman, to our exhibitions, programs, and services, and through our Web site. Conscious of this community-oriented mission we aim to further engage our current on-line audiences and simultaneously grow an interactive Web community. ArtShare works within the goals of our mission to share our collection with our visitors in the way they would prefer and allow them to spread the word about our collection on their own terms using their personal profiles. Rather than expect everyone to come directly to our Web site to learn about our collection, we hope to engage people on their terms, in their own social space. Knowing that community extends beyond our own presence we developed this application to be utilized on a broader level so that many institutions and artists can share their own collections using this framework. By opening up the application to all of these uses we hope it serves the visitor the most by giving them a great variety of works discover (and share) in their own backyard.