By Riley Kaminer
Scott Stiner is on a mission to make access to art education more accessible to all, and empower buyers with the insights necessary to make informed purchase decisions.
A collector himself, who relocated to Miami Beach from Pennsylvania in June 2020, Stiner founded Artmatcher as a digital solution to help people connect with, learn about, and experience art across digital and physical spaces.
The app, which is currently available in the Apple App Store and Google Play, enables users to tap its proprietary art tags – NFC-embedded stickers – next to art pieces that interest them. Users are then provided with all the relevant information about that art piece, including its description and a biography of the artist. They can also share this information with friends and interact with the artist directly through social media.
“Over time, through either the digital actions in the app or the physical actions in the NFC tags, we begin to learn what that person likes,” Stiner told Refresh Miami. “And after about 100 actions, we can actually direct them to tags, direct them to museums, and direct them to art fairs that have the type of art they want to see.”
Eventually, the plan is to also create a Reddit-style forum through which users can discuss the art that interests them. The ultimate goal is to make art enjoyment more of a social experience.
So far, Artmatcher has been funded internally, but the startup has plans to launch a round of $4 million in external funding to enable the startup to grow from its current userbase, which is in the thousands, to over a million.
Artmatcher’s 11 full-time employees have already overseen a range of high-profile partnerships, including the Fort Lauderdale Art and Design Week. “Broward County has now asked us to install our tags on all of their public art through the entire county on a permanent basis, not just for the art week,” asserted Stiner. The startup is also partnering with the Superfine Art Fair in Miami and the LA Art Show, and plans to make a full release of the Artmatcher platform during the Urban Art Fair in Paris in April.
Miami is the inaugural market for Artmatcher. “I wish I had known about Miami 30 years ago,” said Stiner, noting both Miami’s excellence in the international art space as well as in the startup scene.
Looking forward, Stiner signaled that the company will move into the metaverse with additional offerings for digital art – including NFTs and AI generated art. “We were very clear with ourselves when we first started Artmatcher that we do not want to be tastemakers, so we don’t want to pick winners and losers,” said Stiner of the controversy around these new types of digital art. “We feel like every piece of art has a match somewhere, and it’s our job to find that match – not to judge the art.”
For now though, Stiner is focused on getting Artmatcher into the hands of more art collectors and enthusiasts. “I’m excited to see it in action a little bit and give people a tool that lets them actually fall in love with art and become very engaged. It’s extremely rewarding.”
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