What if art were not a luxury good? What if collecting — instead of being a mark of wealth, or an investment like stocks or bonds — took place in a gift economy?

In reality, few working artists would wish for the disappearance of the art market. But the Fine Art Adoption Network, a Web site created last year by a Brooklyn artist, Adam Simon, enables artists to give their work away to anyone who falls in love with it.

Mr. Simon’s initial impulse in creating FAAN was practical, not utopian. His father had recently died, and his mother was moving from a house in Boston to a small apartment in New York. As a result, he had to remove a couple of his large paintings from her house, and he didn’t have anywhere to put them.

When a friend alerted him to a new commissioning program at the downtown art space Art in General, Mr. Simon came up with a solution. He submitted an application and received a $10,000 grant, which included both an artist’s fee and money for a Web designer, John Weir, to create the Web site, which went live last spring.

Artists have to be invited to join the site, either by other artists or by one of the collaborating institutions, which include Art in General, Arthouse in Austin, Texas, Gallery 400 in Chicago, and Transformer Gallery in Washington, D.C. Currently, 110 artists are offering work through FAAN. Would-be collectors can browse the list of artists and images of already adopted and still available work. If you like something, you send an e-mail to the artist, and a kind of courtship begins — since the artists get to choose whom they entrust their work to.

Artists say they enjoy having the power to choose the right owner for their art. “Somebody’s not offering you money, so you’re judging by a whole different set of values, like what they write,” Jill Henderson, who does wall drawings in people’s homes or in public spaces, said. “I’ve had some people adopt, and I just liked their last name.”

An artist who lives in Long Island City, Fawn Krieger, put on the site a sculpture called “Trophy,” and received an e-mail from an 11-year-old boy. “The first e-mail I got from him was like ‘Hi Fawn, I’m a kid,'” Ms. Krieger recalled. The boy said he liked the sculpture because it wasn’t a trophy for anything in particular; instead, he could imagine what it was for. “It was so wonderful,” Ms. Krieger said. “I’ve had adults write to me and not entirely get it.”

Another artist, Daniel Wiener, was drawn to FAAN because of the chance to open up his work to a wider audience, including people “who can’t pay art prices.” A drawing he put on the site was adopted by the father of an autistic child “who draws and responds a lot to art,” Mr. Wiener said. Another work, an abstract sculpture called “Wriggling,” was adopted by a therapist, who put it in her office. In a note to Mr. Wiener posted on the Web site, she wrote: “The kids that I work with are obsessed with your sculpture! It has led to some very interesting conversations about ‘wriggling’ and feelings.”

Mr. Wiener said the adopters of his work “can keep it forever and give it to their kids, but if they don’t want it anymore, they need to give it back to me. They can’t sell it or auction it or throw it away.”

The Web site itself sets very few rules. There is an adoption limit of three works per person or institution in a one-month period. The adopter is responsible for the cost of transporting the work. And there is this note: “Please do not use this site for commercial purposes.” (Mr. Simon said that means no interior decorators or art consultants.) But everything else is up to the artists’ choices.

One very successful artist on the site, Amy Sillman, who is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., decided not to let a museum that has exhibited her paintings adopt a work on paper from the Web site, Mr. Simon said. “I think she felt, rightly, that a museum should buy work by an artist,” he said.

FAAN offers a kind of corrective to the art market, Mr. Simon said. “The art market works against the idea of getting art into people’s homes,” he said. “Part of how you get prices up so high is to have this huge pool of artists of which only a few are [celebrated], and a large number of people who are interested in art” but can’t afford to buy it. FAAN is meant to connect that large pool of artists with that large pool of art-lovers. “This project means that children can grow up in the presence of artwork who wouldn’t otherwise,” Mr. Simon said.

Sofia Hernandez, who runs Art in General’s New Commissions Program, which is intended to support projects that can’t be seen in a conventional gallery setting, said that Art in General is raising more funds for FAAN so that the Web site can grow. She and Mr. Simon both said that one goal is to make it fully international. So far there have been several adopters from overseas, including from Israel, Italy, and Uruguay, but the artists are mostly American.

“If the Web site takes off on an international scale, we’re going to do another evaluation and hopefully create a marketing plan,” so that it can become self-sustaining, Ms. Hernandez said. “Right now it’s great, it’s free, the artist’s love it, but it’s work.”

Mr. Simon said that only one artist he knows reacted negatively to FAAN. The artist complained that people “don’t see spending money on art as something they should do — and now you’re going to give it away to them for free!” Mr. Simon recalled. “But people have adopted work and then gone back to the artist and bought work. … It’s going to create new collectors.”