Quick followup on @Nicholas_Bokulich's reply: I wrote up a forum post showing how to use the Artifact API to load and view Artifacts as Metadata (e.g. to accomplish what the CLI is doing in this section of the metadata tutorial). There's also some other tidbits about the Artifact API in that post that are not included in the main (and currently incomplete) Artifact API tutorial, so the post may be helpful to you: