My Journey: In Search For The Ultimate Art World

ARTDEX is an art tech startup offering a digital platform designed with artists and art lovers in mind. They are the creators and consumers of art, yet are currently disconnected with no centralized destination or a consolidated community of their own. ARTDEX offers a free online technology and archiving tool that allows you to keep a record of your own art collection as well as a digital archive of any artwork in the world that brings you pleasure! It helps you organize and curate your art collections on our website and through the convenient and easy use of a mobile app.Beyond offering a high-performance collection management utility, ARTDEX provides a global community, a new and exciting social-network platform unavailable in the traditional art industry eco-system today. With ARTDEX, you can now view and connect with art lovers all over the world. You can comment on individual artworks or collections, ask questions, begin a conversation, share inspirational ideas, or simply express one’s admiration by the click of follow or like.The art community has historically and geographically been disconnected, insular and siloed, leaving countless artists and art lovers marginalized and without a platform to connect. With ARTDEX, a global community of creative individuals will now have the opportunity to finally find each other. ARTDEX is a labor of love for me, born from an unwavering passion for art and a genuine desire to make the art world a better place.Oh Rembrandt And More Rembrandt.. My InspirationIn the second year of my Masters program at Christie’s, I interned at the Morgan Library and Museum’s Drawings and Prints Department as a curatorial researcher. After graduation, I was hired for the museum’s very first online art cataloguing project, “Corsair,” for the museum’s extraordinary Rembrandt prints (etchings) collection.“Corsair” was led by a world-renowned Rembrandt scholar, the acting head of the Department at that time, John Langeloth Loeb Professor Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann of The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Under the guidance of this eminent scholar, I had an incredible opportunity to immerse myself in over 500 of some of the most important Rembrandt etchings in the world. As you can imagine, it was a dream job for any art history major, let alone one embarking on a second career. I relished every moment of that experience and to this day feel very privileged to have had that opportunity.It was during this time of intense research that I had my eureka moment and first envisioned ARTDEX. I thought, if we could catalogue Rembrandt online, why not every piece of art? What if we created a massive online archive for the entire world where all the hidden and unseen art could finally emerge from behind our countless walls and basements, private homes and archives? What if we could bring the entire art world together online?What’s The Big Idea?Over the following years, I threw myself into bringing my vision to life. Like any entrepreneur, I faced plenty of hurdles and challenges, and like any entrepreneur, I find my way through them. Although ARTDEX is not the only online platform for art archival (our friends at Behance offer a similar service, allowing a design community to upload images and store information regarding their portfolios) and there are a number of heavy-duty archival software suites available for museums and galleries, but ARTDEX aims to do something different.The art world and the technology world haven’t historically had a lot of contact - it’s paint, canvas and clay vs. circuits, screens and data. In recent years, digital art has started to make its way toward the mainstream and photoshop and other digital tools have become invaluable to much of the art community. But the art community as a whole hasn’t really embraced technology as more than another medium to enhance art.We created ARTDEX to bridge that gap and use technology to meet the needs of the fragmented art world. Just as it has done for books, periodicals, movies, and all sorts of other information, technology can give us fundamentally new ways to experience art. It can also fundamentally reshape the art world. The art community has historically been small, limited to the elite, and closed off to outsiders, giving exposure to just a handful of famous artists and collectors. That may have been fine for the old art world, but there’s a ton of incredible art out there that also deserves to be shared with the world. And there are a ton of artists and art lovers who want to see it, but have no way to access it. That’s where ARTDEX comes in.Art, Technology and TechDay, Happily Ever AfterAt ARTDEX, we’re using technology to democratize the art world. The internet and cloud technology is all about connectivity and accessibility, and that’s just what the art world is missing. ARTDEX handles your archival needs with digitizing tools, but more importantly, it gives you a way to create and establish your unique ‘digital identity’ to discover and connect with other artists and art lovers in a global forum.Art is created everyday in every corner of the world, to be shown and appreciated. Art is meant for the people and we’re using much-needed technology to get it to them. That’s why we were so honored and excited to be a part of NY Tech Day! Just as we’re proud to bring tech to the art world, we’re so proud to bring art to the tech world - finally!