The Last Museum: Semantic search across 5.8M artworks from major museums

I was thinking of doing something like this myself. I've been pondering how to use AI to support, rather than subordinate, human work. Instead of using AI-generated artworks for blog posts and press releases, it would be better to use AI to "intelligently" search across humanity's collective oeuvre and find artwork relevant to the accompanying text. Once the AI hype dies down a little, it would be worth thinking about how we can highlight or enhance human creativity instead of downright replacing it.

I used the same concept to build a searchable database of YouTube thumbnails in my watch history. I always end up trying to remember a video I didn't finish from a week or two ago and YouTube's history search plain sucks. So I built an app that tracks all my watch history across all devices, downloads the thumbnails and runs them through a local Gemma model to write a paragraph description and OCR any text in the thumbnail.

Currently at 30,000 thumbnails described, basically 2 years of watch history. Search is via FTS5 in SQLite and works great on an 8 year old MacBook Pro.

The title assumes that the point of a museum is simple being able to see the work; it ignores the interpretive benefits of a curated exhibit.

"Art Deco" search is _terrific_

https://lastmuseum.com/search?q=art%20deco

I tried searching for "holofernes" and got many paintings not-of-but-aesthetically-similar-to Judith beheading Holofernes. I then typed directly "judith and holofernes" and got similarly undesired results. I know that I'm "holding it wrong" here, but this might not be the last museum after all.

Incredibly off-putting name for a search tool

https://www.europeana.eu/en indexes 60 million museum objects in Europe, although that includes objects that aren't artworks.

(I suspect The Last Museum is using the same open data exports.)

Would make sense to have a copywrite filter so you can specify to see only public domain images.

This is cool, but I agree name is weird. Kind of wonder if the timeline should be logarithmic because I would assume the distribution of art over the years is far from uniform.

Interesting concept. Its desperately missing a decent filter function though.

Just dumping a million results on the user to doom-scroll through is a bit problematic in terms of UI/UX.

Completely failed if you search by Artist name

There's nothing between 1975-2026?

EDIT: Ok, there is, but it needs a query...

Very cool. If the author's here: is this using the new EmbeddingGemma2, presumably? It's been absolutely blowing my mind.

I searched for 'soviet' and it matched cylinder seal 3500bc https://lastmuseum.com/art/cylinder-seal-307

soviets were big into seals and govt procedures . maybe?

Curious whether the embeddings come off the images or the catalog text, because in my experience museum metadata is wildly uneven (half the Met's older records are basically "Vase, terracotta"). Also, do you dedupe across institutions?

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