Although the caliber of information in Smartify is quite high when it works - I was able to learn more about specific figures in J.M.W. “You just end up using your email and Instagram.”Īfter a few weeks of trying out apps-for-art in museums and galleries, on street corners and in the occasional coffee shop, I found that they did not increase the quality of my visual encounters.
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She noted that the vast majority of apps that people download sit unused on their phones. “A few years ago, there was an app craze, and now everyone’s entering this post-app phase in the museum industry,” said JiaJia Fei, director of digital for the Jewish Museum. Similarly, the Jewish Museum introduced a new set of audio tours in July, all on a web-based interface. This translates into content that loads directly in your phone browser as a website, no download required. “While the app was doing a lot of things well, we wanted to create something more seamless,” said Sofie Andersen, the interim chief digital officer at the Met. The Metropolitan Museum, which rolled out its own app with fanfare in 2014, shuttered it last year. It’s telling, perhaps, that even as these apps build out their databases, some museums themselves are starting to shy away from apps altogether. The app is elegant and straightforward, and the source is generally cited and fact-checked. People with visual impairments can use Smartify with their phones’ native audio settings and the app is working to integrate audio. Part of the app’s mission is ease of use and accessibility. Hold it up to a Gustave Caillebotte still life, as I did, and the app provides information that’s already available on the wall, including the chance to click-to-learn-more. Smartify, on the other hand, wants to app-ify what was once the purview of an audio guide. Magnus doesn’t give you an art history lesson, or even much of a basic summary about a work like Shazam, it’s a little blip of information in the dark. “I loved that the app could scan a piece and give you the exact history of it, when it was last sold, and the price it was sold for. “I used to go to these art fairs, and I felt embarrassed or shy, because nothing’s listed,” Ms. Before trying the app, she said, the lack of information was a barrier. Jelena Cohen, a brand manager for Colgate-Palmolive, bought her first artwork, a photograph, at Frieze after using Magnus. Galleries rarely post prices and often don’t provide basic wall text, so one often has to ask for the title or even the artist’s name. Then there is a more salient question for these platforms: What information can an app provide that will enhance the user’s experience of looking at art? What can a Shazam for art really add? There is Shazam for plants or Shazam for clothes and now, Shazam, for art. Shazam’s wild success - it boasts more than a billion downloads and 20 million uses daily, and was purchased by Apple for a reported $400 million last year - has spawned endless imitations. First came Shazam, an app that allows users to record a few seconds of a song and instantly identifies it. Magnus is part of a wave of smartphone apps trying to catalog the physical world as a way of providing instantaneous information about songs or clothes or plants or paintings.
Magnus then slotted this information into a folder marked “My Art” for digital safekeeping - and future looking. In 2010, it had sold for $170,500 at Sotheby’s in New York, the app told me. It was titled “ Model With Empire State Building.” dated 1992, measured 72 inches by 60 inches, and was for sale for $300,000. The painting was by Philip Pearlstein, according to the app, known for reinvigorating the tradition of realist figure painting. I opened a smartphone app called Magnus, snapped a quick picture, and clicked “Use.” Seconds later, I got that addictive, satisfying click. At the Betty Cuningham gallery on the Lower East Side recently, I noticed an arresting painting: It showed a nude woman curled against a window, asleep, with the old New Yorker Hotel and Empire State Building in view and a fish above her, hanging or floating.
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