I recently learned, via a risograph printing class, that a surprising
number of art museums offer open access APIs. It's wonderful. It's
comforting to know that some Met artifacts are essentially just a curl away.
Browsing a few in more detail, I was surprised to find that the Art
Institute of Chicago's API includes a has_not_been_viewed_much field for its artwork. It's a boolean that describes whether the
artwork hasn't been visited on their website very much.
Of course, that begs the question: what are these artworks? Why aren't they being viewed? What counts as "not viewed much"? What is art? Why are we here? And so on.
Some of those questions are hard to answer. For now, at least, we can think about them while enjoying some underappreciated art.