Curioos has teamed up with Wacom, a leader in the design production of artistic tools aimed at facilitating digital creativity, bringing you their second curated collection thus far (you may know Wacom as the guys who make that stylus-thingy your design friends use when they’re working). Curioos, a self-proclaimed playground for digital art enthusiasts, sells high quality reprints of independent artists’ works. Having previously teamed up with Fubiz founder Romain Colin for their first curated collection, Curioos routinely seeks out ‘tastemakers’ in digital art and allows them, along with users in the Curioos community, to curate their favorite art available in the Curioos catalog. One thing that really stands out for Curioos, both from
other art-vending websites and from other Paris startups, is the tangibility of the company. Located just south of the Cemetary Pere Lachaise in an government-funded incubator meant for smiths of all kinds, Curioos employs an actual printer, Clement, who specializes is printing, framing, and ensures that each reprint gets from printer to your door with the utmost care.

“So, can I get my stuff sold on Curioos?”

Well, if you’re anything like me, probably not. Curioos works directly with artists of a certain ‘caliber’ and signs contracts with them to sell a limited supply of reprints, in order to ensure that each piece of art retains its value. So while all your dormroom buddies had that same poster of a caterpillar smoking on top of a mushroom (just me?), you can blow them away by having one of 200 copies of any of the great works on Curioos. Personally, this is one of my favorite aspects of Curioos – the idea that I can have something that my friends can’t.

Tumblr integration for all you lazy bloggers

Along with their new curated collection, Curioos has integrated their entire site with Tumblr. Now I’m a WordPress man myself, but that’s probably because I like to write actual words in my post, but if recent trends like Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling are any indicator, there are a fair amount of people who like curating things they find on the internet – Tumblr users on Curioos will be able to repost their favorite digital art on curioos with one easy click.
Users on the site are split up into two types: curators and artists. While I’m no art  aficionado, I enjoyed being able to give my artistic opinion: you can see the artwork I liked on my profile, and you can follow me or other curators. The site has a strong community aspect to it, which is definitely an element of the art community that has been lost during the transition to the internet; the one thing I felt it lacked was significant visibility about what other users are looking at. I had quite some trouble finding another user, but once I did I was easily able to follow them, see who followed them, and all those other community-oriented things. For the more practically minded, the site’s explore section let’s you search by most likes/views/comments ( a social search), as well as by theme – “Skull” and “monster” are both on the list, if you were worried – and you can even search by ‘dominant color.’
Curioos has hit the mark on one of my favorite things to see in startups, and something I think almost always spells success – adapting an out-dated activities to an up-to-date medium: Curioos has brought to the web the experience of discovering independent art so good you want to buy it.