Fake your way to art connoisseur with this ‘Shazam for art’ app

Have you ever been walking down the grand halls of an art museum, on a date with a person you just met, feeling the immense weight of centuries worth of culture — sweating nervously — dreading the moment when your date realizes you’re not the “art-lover” your Tinder-bio made you out to be. If so, good news, because Smartify has come to the rescue.

Smartify is a new app for art-lovers (real or not) that can identify paintings and give you instant commentary and extra information beyond what says on the plaque beneath it. Users will be able to kiss shoddy audio guides goodbye and receive their own curation through their smartphones.

According to New Scientist, the app will be launched in May and will feature all the artworks of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and London’s Wallace Collection, as well as selected works from Louvre and The Met in New York. In a conversation with New Scientist, Smartify’s co-founder likened the app to a mix between Spotify, as music discovery service, and the music recognition app Shazam — but focused on visual works instead of music.

The app is meant to complement real-world visits to museums and utilizes advanced image recognition and digitized versions of artwork collections. With the app, you’ll be able to scan paintings (or even postcards featuring said paintings) and the app will run it through the digitized collections it has access to and find information on it.

The makers of Smartify hope to get artworks from more museums and institutions once it launches and becomes more popular. The museums that collaborate with Smartify will be able to access demographic information about the users and the artworks that they look up.

Users will also be able to create their own personal art collection in the app, making it easier to prove to people that you are cultured, by whipping out your pocket art collection. Who knows, maybe art connoisseurs will finally be able to join a Pokémon Go-esque fad and go around the world and collect famous paintings that they’ve seen live.

Hopefully the new app will enhance the experience of art enthusiasts, or at least help the-not-so-art-savvy impress their dates.