The Art of the Tablet
In London, Museum visitors are dashing through the Tate Modern, taking in works of art—on their smartphones. During the latest Art Basel art fair in Switzerland, a collector agreed to buy a $250,000 painting—while sitting in a hair salon in Los Angeles, looking at the work on her tablet. These days, anyone with an iPad can create their own Damien Hirst painting, thanks to an app from the Gagosian Gallery, which recently showed the artist's work at its 11 global outposts.
Digital tools are changing the way that art is bought, sold and simply looked at. Collectors who once traveled across the world to art fairs and auctions are buying more works without seeing them in person, relying instead on digital views. Galleries now have the ability to show many more works to interested collectors than they have in their showrooms, simply by swiping through digital inventories. Museums are encouraging visitors to download digital apps to get more information about works on display. Some museum and gallery apps allow visitors to zoom in on a work for a closer look than they would get with the naked eye—a development that will likely be bolstered by Apple's introduction this week of a new iPad with a sharper display screen.
"We're in the midst of a sea change in the way museums relate to their audiences," says Peter Samis, associate curator of interpretive media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "There's this booming demand at the highest level, like trustees are all saying, 'Where's our iPad app?' at every museum, large and small, across America."
Officials at Christie's and Sotheby's say they're seeing more iPads and other devices filling the room during sales. Christie's, which already offers absentee bidding via its website, expects to extend absentee bidding to its iPad app next month, along with new features like access to condition reports on works. Sotheby's just updated its iPad catalog app to allow collectors to take notes in digital catalogs during sales.
Tablets are also increasingly a staple of art fairs. At Art Basel in Switzerland last June, dealer Adam Sheffer, a partner at the New York gallery Cheim & Read, met with a client interested in a work by Ghada Amer, an Egyptian painter whose labor-intensive pieces are filled with intricate embroidery. The gallery's works were inventoried on the iPad using ArtBinder, an app that is swiftly replacing the use of physical binders at art fairs. The Los Angeles-based collector was ready to buy the work, but he wanted the signoff of his wife, who was more than 5,800 miles away in a hair salon in Los Angeles. Mr. Sheffer emailed a close-up of the work to the wife, an art enthusiast, who agreed to the $250,000 sale. "The whole thing took an hour," Mr. Sheffer says.
Miami Beach collector Dennis Scholl says photography and video art are a natural fit when he's considering buying an artwork based on a digital image; for sculpture, with its scale issues, and drawings, with their subtle gradations of shading, he likes to see the works in person. Mr. Scholl recently pulled the trigger on a work by Tamy Ben-Tor, using his iPad to view the video of the Israeli artist as an old woman in a forest. "The iPad, because of the beauty of the images and the clarity of the reproduction, it makes you braver as a collector," he says.
Digital tools can also help collectors organize large inventories they may have stored in locations around the world. Curator Laura J. Mueller tracks more than 700 Japanese works scattered across two homes and a warehouse for a private New York collector by organizing digital images of the pieces using an iPhone and iPad app, Collectrium.
Several art galleries have rolled out digital apps, partly to reach collectors who rely on their devices when shopping for art. With the Damien Hirst feature on the Gagosian Gallery's app, developed by the New York firm @radical.media, users can not only look at the artist's "spot paintings," they can also manipulate the works to create new digital versions, temporarily changing the colors or the size of the dots by tilting and pinching the screen. It's a slick marketing feature and a cheeky way to engage potential buyers.
In May, the next edition of the Gagosian app will feature photographer Taryn Simon. A tap on any of roughly 200 photographs by Ms. Simon will take users deeper into the backstory of images from one of her series. Gagosian isn't currently showing Ms. Simon's pieces in its brick-and-mortar galleries, but the app will expose her work to potential buyers.
About 34,000 people have downloaded the free Gagosian app since the first issue was released last June, says Kara Vander Weg, who manages the app at Gagosian. Ms. Vander Weg says gallery owner Larry Gagosian and his friends own iPads, and they noticed that the devices have been ubiquitous at art fairs, so creating an app became a priority for gallery executives. "They all came to the same conclusion," she says. "This is where we need to go next."
Museums are coming to the same conclusion. The Guggenheim in New York did away with the traditional wall plaques for its recent Maurizio Cattelan exhibit; instead, it put all the information about the displayed works on an app that visitors could download to their iPads or smartphones. The museum has also put iPads in the hands of tour guides for a current exhibition of works by the late American sculptor John Chamberlain, best known for his pieces made from twists of crushed car metal. The devices offer additional information on the artist or extras such as a video showing him at work. Kim Kanatani, the museum's education director, says such tactics are a key to increasing "the average three seconds" that visitors usually spend in front of a work.
The Tate Modern in London recently unveiled a free iPhone app, "Race Against Time," in which a chameleon moves through major art movements, battling enemies such as a fire-breathing Pablo Picasso and green bottles of absinthe. Players can only activate the "turbo" level when they're inside a Tate gallery—one way of getting more visitors through the door.
At the Museum of Old and New Art, a collection housed in a black-walled subterranean space in Tasmania, Australia, pieces never appear with labels. Instead, visitors are loaned iPod Touches, which they can use to learn about surrounding artworks and vote on whether they love or hate a piece, getting feedback in real time on other visitors' opinions. Artworks may be moved to new positions around the museum based on the ratings, and the museum may even decide to place a work everyone seems to hate in a prominent new spot, partly to mess with the status quo, says Nic Whyte, creative director and co-founder of Art Processors, which helped devise the museum's digital strategy.
As museums continue building mobile devices into more exhibits—the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston now offers multimedia tours on 750 rentable iPod Touches—staffers are debating how to incorporate the technology without turning their visitors into what some in the business call "gallery zombies," guests who stand inches from a masterpiece while glued to their screens.
London-based art collector and art adviser Lauren Prakke says digital gadgets already fill art events. "Sometimes you think, wow, you've got some of the most incredible art in the world in the room and someone's staring at the telephone," she says. "I'm like, 'Am I the only one looking at the art?'"
