Much like rap songs, I think art, and particularly contemporary art, is one of the most mysterious things to understand. So I was wondering if there's a RapGenius for art.
We're building this at Artsy.net! It's in early stages but this week we opened up the ability for all users to contribute insights about artworks on the site (through "Posts", the best of which get featured on artwork and artist pages).
Everyone should contribute! Here's some artworks with great insights our early contributors (art world insiders, art historians) have made:
Unfortunately, I cannot think of such a service. But your question leads me to imagine an annotation system for the Google Art Project that could be rather interesting. It would be great to be able to select a piece of artwork and then see particular parts of it analyzed / critiqued upon by professors, art historians, other artists, anyone who has something to share &c. (obviously these annotations would be hidden by default as not to mar the beauty of the piece in question).
Personally, I think such annotation systems could be the future of internet sharing / collaboration. It would be very useful, to me at least, to be able to visit a site, whether it be a text article or image gallery and see interesting annotations. Such a thing could be implemented as a browser plug-in tying back to an online service - i.e., you can make annotations in your browser but then visit the main site and search for pages and see annotations others have made. The "pinning" of annotations could also lend itself well to the Pintrest format / formula.
Everyone should contribute! Here's some artworks with great insights our early contributors (art world insiders, art historians) have made:
http://artsy.net/artwork/diego-velazquez-the-toilet-of-venus... http://artsy.net/artwork/manuel-alvarez-bravo-la-tolteca http://artsy.net/artwork/nick-darmstaedter-sting http://artsy.net/artwork/marc-chagall-clown-with-mandolin