Art museum will send art directly to your phone with new texting feature

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is making it easier for art lovers to see its extensive collection, no matter where they are in the world.

SFMOMA has unveiled "Send me SFMOMA," a new texting feature that allows anyone with a cellphone to receive images of art catered to their specific interest or mood almost instantaneously via text message.

SFMOMA's creative technologist, Jay Mollica, writes on the museum's website that, like many museums, it houses more works of art than it can showcase. In fact, out of the nearly 35,000 works in their collection, only 5 percent are available for viewing. The museum says that in order to view each work of art it currently displays you'd have to walk nearly seven miles; to view the entire collection, you'd walk roughly 121.3 miles.

To access the tool, which is free other than the standard messaging rates, simply text 572-51 with the words "send me" followed by a keyword or even an emoji. Send me SFMOMA then searches for a related image of art and sends it back to your phone in a matter of seconds.

Mollica writes that the tool was created as a way to "bring transparency to the collection while engendering further exploration and discussion among users."

"We didn't expect any single Send Me SFMOMA user to ever get through all 34,678 art works in the collection," Mollica writes. "But what we have seen, and hope to continue to see, are thousands of people connecting with artwork in fun, new, and very personal ways."

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