Art.sy got a lot of press last year for its plans to create a Pandora-like collaborative filter for art. Today, TechCrunch gushes about the investors behind Artfinder.com, another digital art portal, which has backing from Reid Hoffman and Wellington Partners and Sherry Courtu.

Here’s how TechCrunch describes the new site. Here’s a link to Artfinder.com to judge for yourself:

Artfinder has partnered with galleries, libraries, museums and artists worldwide to build an extremely comprehensive online catalogue of fine art featuring over 250,000 works from over 400 institutions. I’ve seen the demo and it’s pretty amazing – and you can too as the site goes live today.

Users create their own ‘art gallery’, collect favourite artworks, and share them with their friends via Facebook, Twitter and email.

Although this sounds like an obvious move, believe me, finding the art and dealing with all the galleries in question is a real barrier to entry which Artfinder appears to have cracked.

It’s also partnering with museums, galleries and artists to create create discovery and marketing apps for smartphones and tablet devices like the iPad. Artfinder will look georgeous on a Retina screen.

The revenue model is from the sales of apps, original artworks and print-on-demand items such as posters and postcards, and the startup has cut rev share deals with museums, libraries, artists and galleries.

Wellington Partners, Reid Hoffman and Sherry Coutu invest in Artfinder, the LastFM of art (TechCrunch)