Recommendable iPhone/iPad app: Art Authority.
Tens of thousands of pieces of classic art, easily browsable (with info or full screen). Even with painters I thought I knew quite well, I've already seen many works I don't remember having seen before.
It also works well as something to do with your eyes and hands while you listen to a podcast or such. (And this is one of the cases where the iPad can multitask.) Because it doesn't engage the left brains as much as some things, and you can pause it at any second.
Some may say you can get all those pictures for free on the web. To that I'll say it may be true, but only if you consider your time worthless. I have tried to find paintings in decent size on the web, and it's a loooong job. It's like having to rummage through a city-sized attic with half a billion paintings to find the 2,000 which are worth looking at.
Quite true, Eo. I wrote an article on photography and Venetian painters and spent more time looking for decent jpegs of their paintings than actually writing the damn thing.
ReplyDeleteI can see the value of this kind of application. Quite nice.
ReplyDeleteAn immediate issue for me though would be the disappointment of not being able to find my favourite painters/paintings in it.
Also, the right way to do this is to create an open public resource of images of paintings. A bit like album cover databases today.
Being closed in its architecture, this app therefore sucks in much the same way that art CD-ROMs did in the early 1990s.