I went to the Harvard Fogg Art museum yesterday, one of my favorite museums just a few blocks away from my office in Harvard Square. A particularly tall painting by Jackson Pollock from 1950 titled Number 2 caught my eye. I took out my phone, searched the custom art database I spent the last 3 years building, and discovered it is, in fact, Pollock’s tallest painting at 287x91.4 cm. Harvard may or may not already know they have the tallest Pollock painting (it was not listed on the label), but I wonder if they know that it is more than twice the height of an average Pollock (86.67 x 99.81 cm.) ? That Pollock averaged 14.5 paintings per year, but the year he painted Number 2, he painted 56 paintings? My guess is they probably don't know all of that. Here's why.

We have over 550 art museums, 400+ collegiate art history programs, and the global art market does $60B+ in annual sales with individual works selling for more than one hundred million dollars... yet we lack good data and analytical tools for art. Even Google Search can’t answer the most basic questions about how many works our most important artists have made. Instead this information (when available) is locked inside rare, expensive, out-of-print, controversial, printed books called catalogues raisonnés .

What’s the impact of not having up to date and easily accessible data? Popular estimates say up to 20% of works in museums and galleries are either forged or misattributed often supported with fake documentation. Frustrated by how little we know about our most important cultural works, and how art history is being rewritten by forgers, I decided to create the Artnome database.

I have a vision where we use quantitative language to describe artworks in the same way as in business and sports. We don’t simply say Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors is “really good”. We say things like Curry has a .438 three point shooting percentage, the best of any active player. Why get so nuanced in our analysis? We measure and quantify the things we care about to better understand them, deepen our enjoyment of them, to tell better stories around them, and to make better decisions and investments.

By combining information from catalogues raisonnés, auctions, and exhibitions, we can tap into new cultural context and build sophisticated market intelligence for art. With a complete view of an artist's work, we are able to create sports-style statistics highlighting the elements that make artists and their work unique.

Below are sample analytics for Vincent Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock from the database.

Although both artists lived short lives (Pollock died at 44 and Van Gogh at 37), Van Gogh produced more than twice the number of paintings of Pollock.