Can Artsy make fine art as accessible as luxury fashion?

Are you familiar with the canvases of Oscar Murillo? Or the ceramics of Jun Kaneko? Unless you travel in the rarefied circles of the art world, probably not. But a New York startup hatched in a Princeton dorm room wants to use technology to bring the artifacts of the elite to everyone else.

Launched in 2010, Artsy is part of a relatively new crop of startups trying to bring the traditional art world into the digital 21st century with a website and mobile app for connecting galleries and artists with collectors and consultants. Over the past couple of years, the startup has built up a searchable database of more than 50,000 artworks from more than 11,000 artists. But it’s also gone a step further: through its Art Genome Project (much like Pandora’s music genome project), computer scientists and art historians analyze each piece of artwork and artist in its database and assign it a set of “genes” that denote everything from a historical period and location of origin to a work’s image quality and category.