About

Art theorist André Malraux was the first to envision "Le musée imaginaire", "the museum without walls" as it was translated that exhibits the world's greatest art all under one roof, free of georgraphical constraints. A realisation of Malraux's imaginary museum is USEUM, a virtual museum that democratises art. USEUM exhibits 84,000 paintings, illustrations & drawings by 8,000 famous artists of the past and nearly 2,000 participant contemporary artists from 106 countries around the world. More importantly, with more than 100,000 artwork ratings to date, USEUM proudly features one of the first ever democratically-curated art exhibitions. On USEUM artists and museums promote their collections to an international demographic and can also earn revenues from them. Internet users and art lovers on USEUM: discover works of all times and genres; send their favourite ones as e-cards to their friends; learn about art with USEUM's educational knowledge base consisting of essays that explain in simple language all of the 16 major art movements from the History of Art; download and use freely thousands of famous artworks in high quality; play an active role in shaping fundamental aspects of USEUM, such as its curation (through artwork ratings), documentation (through artwork tagging) and its expansion (through the addition of artworks and the contribution of art history essays). USEUM begun as the Ph.D. project of Foteini Valeonti at the UCL in London with title "Making art accessible with crowdsourcing". With a background in Computer Science and a Masters in Interactive Digital Media from Ravensbourne (City University), where she specialised in new technologies for museums and cultural heritage, Foteini turned her PhD into a startup with the help of her co-founders after raising £110,000 from private investors. USEUM has received various disctintions, including EU's prestigious Seal of Excellence award, and it has been featured on numerous national and international media such as The Times, UCL's Bartlett Annual Review and Wall St. International.