A Billion Works of Art

A Billion Works of Art

All works of art ever made that survive can now, in theory, be gathered together digitally to be presented in a single searchable . These are notes and thoughts on how this might come about, tracking of how close this is to existing, and what the advantages and disadvantages come with this.

You likely have some questions on how accurate any of these is, how I’m defining art and why I don’t count search engines as aggregators.

Art League Table

Art AggregatorArtworks
Europeana60 Million + (as of 9 Dec 2025)
Worldcat343 Million + (guestimate, as of 9 Dec 2025)
Culture Search Japan31,939,853 (as of 9 Dec 2025)
Museum Data Service
View the full league table

Present Notes

Notes on the developments leading to a future where all works of art are gathered together in one site/app/experience for browsing.

  • Deduplicating artworks ?
    by admin8939
    Are two copies of a book the same artwork or two artworks ?
  • Are we talking about the same person ?
    by admin8939
    There are a lot of people who have made the billion artworks, and their art is held around the world by many different institutions. How do we know that the artist in one collection is the same artist as in another collection ?

Future Notes

Scenarios from the future on what this collection of all artworks may enable, and sometimes the downsides it might bring. I inconsistently involve AI in some situations and not others. In all cases I am picturing a happy sunny future where this is the only problem to consider.

  • Show me everything by Rembrandt
    by Richard
    When we say all art works, do we really mean everything, every sketch, every draft, every note, every letter discussing the work’s development, every copy ? How much of an artists oeuvre does a casual viewer want to see ?
  • Finding artist inspirations, Or, Art Plagiarism Detector
    by Richard
    Tracing how one work of art has inspired another is …
  • Your search for Tree returned 227 million results
    by Richard
    Searching amongst all artworks ever made for some common search term, such as finding all the trees ever depicted, might return such a scale of results that it would be hard to know where to start. Much as someone may like looking at tree pictures, do they want to look though millions of them ?