“I love that it’s forcing people to try a bit harder,” he added.

Devilishly, the textbot also doesn’t respond to queries with artists’ names. (“Send me a Picasso” returns nothing but a “try again” message, even though the museum has Picassos.) The project creators’ hope was to lead people to more uncharted discoveries — “a sublime, semi-random search of the collection,” Mr. Winesmith said.

The idea for “Send Me SFMOMA” sprang naturally from work that the museum was already doing, especially as part of its reopening after an expansion last year. Mr. Winesmith said they wanted a way to open up the collection of about 34,000 art works for the public — something with almost no barrier to entry, no apps or downloads. The project uses the roughly 17,000 works that are already indexed online, on the museum’s website, as its base.

But the museum’s artistic responses aren’t always obvious, and they can be humorous or ironic, with a curated feel — the result of smartly applied keywords. Heather Oelklaus, an artist from Colorado Springs, sent in the gun emoji, and received Andy Warhol’s “Triple Elvis.” (In the painting, Elvis holds a gun.)

“Send me love” might produce Robert Indiana’s famous letter assemblage, or a Gertrude Käsebier photo of children playing, or George Herms’s 1961 multimedia “White Glove Cross” — only with a squint or a zoom can you make out the word ‘love’ stenciled atop the cross. The rainbow flag emoji returned a portrait of Harvey Milk, the slain gay civil rights leader.

Responding to emoji texts proved to be among the biggest challenges for the developer, Jay Mollica. Mr. Mollica, the museum’s creative technologist, conceived of the project, but he is not an avid emoji user, and Mr. Winesmith admitted that his own emoji vocabulary was “limited.” So the museum recruited more fluent employees and set up a daylong “emoji boot camp” to understand the nuances of the characters. (“A peach is euphemistic for a bottom — we didn’t know that,” Mr. Winesmith said.)

Not all the emojis or word prompts have artwork associated with them. Mr. Winesmith’s team has been busy filling the holes. On Monday, “send me feminism” returned nothing; on Tuesday, a Judy Chicago work popped up.