You can text SFMOMA and it will respond with art on demand

Here’s a cool trick for art fans. You can text San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art at 572-51 and it will respond with a piece of art from its collection.

Send Me SFMOMA lets you send a keyword and get back a piece of art that matches that word. You can send colors, subjects, moods and even emojis.

The service is powered by SFMOMA’s Collection API, which has data on all of the 35,000+ pieces of art in the collection. When it finds something that matches your request it responds with a picture of the piece, artist, title and date. If more than one piece match the keyword you sent, the number will send a random one each time you send that keyword.

Launched last year, SFMOMA first started with a standard 10-digit number, but recently switched to a special 5-digit number like other high-traffic texting services use to handle high demand.

The number is 572-51, and you can text it now to check out some art. Just say “send me” followed by a keyword to get a piece of art sent back. The service is totally free, but of course you still have to pay your own texting fees if for some reason you don’t have unlimited texting.

The museum notes that their collection today is so large that only about five percent of it can be displayed in the galleries at any given time. On the other hand, Send me SFMOMA has access to the entire collection – meaning you can actually see more art using this service than actually going into the museum.

FYI, the service may be a bit slow because of all the attention the number has been getting today, but it’s been working pretty reliably for most of us at TechCrunch.