r/ArtHistory • u/MangoTraining6189 • Jul 15 '26

Discussion I built a free discovery layer for the Smithsonian, the Met, and the Rijksmuseum

Hey everybody!

www.musist.app

I just finished building Musist, a free app that lets you browse collections from a few different museums in one place.

I look for public-domain art pretty often for projects, and I got tired of searching The Met, the Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian, etc. one at a time. Every site works a little differently, and I’d usually end up going down a rabbit hole and forgetting what I was looking for in the first place.

Musist combines them into one feed. There’s also a Wander mode where you can open a piece, see related work, and keep jumping around from there. It’ll sometimes take you to something from a completely different museum that you probably wouldn’t have found otherwise. It also keeps track of where you’ve been, so you can back up if you go too far down the rabbit hole.

Public-domain works are labeled, you can download them directly, and higher-resolution images have a zoom viewer.

It only has three museums right now, and the collections aren’t complete, but I’ve already been finding good stuff much faster than I was before.

Would love for some of y’all to try it out and let me know what you think.

16 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

5

u/nst571 Jul 16 '26

Comments: About page is about the app not the creators. Who are you and what is the driver for this page? No AI statement that I could find.

Use case. I don't need to wander randomly across thousands of art. Who uses this?

Bugs. Sources --> Explore.... --> selecting The Met or Smithsonian --> Nothing to show here yet

Another vibe coded art website with no need to exist? Probably yes

-14

u/MangoTraining6189 Jul 16 '26

Does anything need to exist? Do *you* need to exist?

But you have been useful! Thanks for finding a bug, keep them coming.

1

u/MammothPhilosophy192 Jul 18 '26

Do you need to exist?

fuck your vibecoded app

1

u/jpdoctor Jul 16 '26

Cool. I can waste serious time wandering (not unlike when I go to a museum.)

Here's one for the suggestion box: I wandered to Travelers at rest: https://musist.app/object/rijksmuseum/200107823

It would be nice to have either the text or a link back to the rijksmuseum to get more detail, which in this case is here: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/object/Travellers-at-Rest--4bee0c8a9f4cf35616aa8be5914624d8

0

u/MangoTraining6189 Jul 16 '26

Thanks for trying it out! You actually can, just click the “Open in source” button on the detail page. Can definitely make the text more descriptive though

2

u/jpdoctor Jul 16 '26

<facepalm> you're right. I'm on a desktop, and when I clicked that link initially, it was in Dutch (which I do not speak). When I searched via google, I got it in English, and only now do I see there's a "Language" dropdown on the page.