San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art Will Text You Art on Demand

The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco is home to thousands of artworks spanning different styles and media. But if you already know what flavor of SFMOMA art you’re in the mood to see, there’s now a way to view it without leaving home. As Engadget reports, the new “Send Me SFMOMA” project allows art lovers to request on-demand images from the museum via text message.

To take advantage of the promotion, you can text 572-51 with the message “Send me…” followed by a feeling, color, or object. Texting “send me birds,” for example, sometimes brings up Rigo 00 (now Rigo 23)’s 2000 piece Lost Rascal depicting a missing cockatiel. Texting “send me sunshine” might show Robert Bechtle’s summery 1977 painting Watsonville Olympia.

The bot even responds to certain emojis, like an ocean wave (this could give you Pseudo Reportage by Nobuyoshi Araki) or a bouquet of flowers (which might turn up Yasumasa Morimura’s An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo [Collar of Thorns]).

SFMOMA doesn’t expect anyone to use the service to browse all 34,678 items in the collection, which is partly the point. By sending one image at a time, recipients are given more time to spend with each one than they may have had in the museum.

“In a world oversaturated with information, we asked ourselves: how can we generate personal connections between a diverse cross section of people and the artworks in our collection?” a statement from SFMOMA reads. “Send Me SFMOMA was conceived as a way to bring transparency to the collection while engendering further exploration and discussion among users.”

Messages sent to SFMOMA may still qualify for local carrier charges, and they only work within the U.S. To explore more artworks from home you can visit SFMOMA’s vast digital collection on its website.

[h/t Engadget]