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  'May,' by Alexander Motyl, $25/month to rent ($550 to buy), artsicle.com.

  Alexander Motyl / artsicle.com

A bevy of new online ventures are helping to streamline the process of buying art for both beginners and established collectors, facilitating keyboard-click access to information and galleries, reports the Wall Street Journal. The aim is to break down some of the social and physical barriers that have previously defined the art world’s Ivory Tower image in order to establish a broader (and younger) audience.

One site, Artsicle, offers rental and rent to buy options of works by contemporary artists.

Two of the more ambitious digital art collecting projects are Paddle 8 and the soon-to-launch Art.sy (backed by the likes of Russian collector Dasha Zhukova, gallerist Larry Gagosian, Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy, and Wendi Murdoch, whose husband, Rupert, is chairman of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp.). 

Paddle 8 provides guest-curated "virtual exhibitions" accompanied by dossiers on participating artists, detailing their work and influences while Arts.sy, with its Art Genome Project, can anticipate a user’s interests and tastes through a database of roughly 700 “genes” that span stylistic qualities and artistic influences. Put more simply, according to Sebastian Cwilich, Art.sy's chief operating officer, “to make all the world's art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection."