As I write this I'm sitting in my new house, which, thus far, has nearly bare walls, so I was excited to notice that a new community site ArtFlock — devoted to buying and selling art online — just launched. Actually, after a bit of reading on the site's blog, I discovered that ArtFlock is the new name for Artists Online which has been around for a while.
The new site is designed to help both artists looking to sell their work, and bare-walled consumers like myself, by connecting the two and smoothing the transaction process.
Using ArtFlock, artists can display and sell their art, and visitors can browse through collections and artists, as well as search for specific artists or types of art. Since ArtFlock is not just a marketplace but also a gallery of sorts there's a handy button at the top of the page that can limit results to show only works that are for sale.
ArtFlock has most of the interactions you'd expect from a social networking site in this day and age including user ratings, tag browsing, favorites (called My Gallery) and more. Interestingly the site doesn't have a “similar artists” features, something the site's blog says is a deliberate choice.
Though at first a lack of "find similar artists" features might seem an oversight, I rather like the absence if for no other reason than I'm a bit tired of always being pointed to similar items. Perhaps ArtFlock should take a tip from LibraryThing and build a “find dissimilar” feature.
I haven't yet bought anything off ArtFlock, but there were a couple of artists that caught my eye and thanks to the My Gallery feature they're bookmarked and saved for future reference. Regrettably none of the artwork I liked was actually for sale, but that's not ArtFlock's fault.
(Note to the ArtFlock team, there's some kind of bug in the zoom image feature that causes the image to disappear shortly after it's loaded in Safari).
[via Mashable]
