r/Museums

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.

It starts off with a sentence saying that we’re in a worldwide emergency and that we need all hands on deck to avert a catastrophe. Good start! Unfortunately, the closest any of the exhibits make to proposing anything impactful is by encouraging people to buy secondhand phones and reduce meat intake. By the way, the meat intake they recommend is to “try to eat meatless meals once a week”. Come on.

Next we get some stuff about medicinal plants and medicinal applications of different animal byproducts, something about rhinos being hunted too much and presentations on how mining is being made more eco-friendly.

And that’s basically it. Until you go and read the plaque with the funders on it, two of which are GSK, pharmaceutical giant and Orsted, an energy company. I didn’t know the rest but at that point I was too angry to sit there and google them.

So a world famous institution with 400 scientists use a “must act now” framing that just lands on individual consumer tweaks. Meanwhile the corporate names attached to the funding are exactly the sort of entities whose systemic practices dwarf anything a museumgoer’s lifestyle choices could offset. Huge gut punch.

Curious to read your thoughts.