Resources: Art Apps

The Google Arts & Culture platform hosts millions of artifacts and pieces of art, ranging from prehistory to the contemporary, shared by museums across the world. But the prospect of exploring all that art can be daunting. To make it easier, we dreamt up a fun solution: connect people to art by way of a fundamental artistic pursuit, the search for the self … or, in this case, the selfie.

We created an experiment that matches your selfie with art from the collections of museums on Google Arts & Culture—and over the past few days, people have taken more than 30 million selfies. Even if your art look-alike is a surprise, we hope you discover something new in the process. (By the way, Google doesn’t use your selfie for anything else and only keeps it for the time it takes to search for matches.)

View Van Gogh’s paintings in more detail. Discover what information is concealed in and under the paint with the acclaimed English language app for tablets ‘Touch Van Gogh‘. What paintings can reveal’. The app shows what is concealed in and under the paint on artworks by Vincent van Gogh. Nine paintings are available on the app.

On 26 June 2015 Touch van Gogh was recognized as one of the Best Apps for Teaching & Learning by The American Association of School Librarians (AASL). In November 2014 the app received two awards: the World Summit Award Mobile in the ‘m-Tourism & Culture’ category and ‘Gold’ in the ‘Best App’ category of the International Design and Communication Award (IDCA). The app was also awarded the Heritage in Motion Award 2014 in the apps for mobile devices category in April 2014.

Smartify is a free app that allows you to scan and identify artworks, access rich interpretation and build a personal art collection in some of the world’s best museums and galleries.

Built for your smartphone, this is an art guide like never before. One that provides information instantly, works across venues and is actually easy to use. We are is a social enterprise serving a global community of art venues, artists, and art lovers and we want you on board.

For us at Smartify, a love of museums demands participation in addressing the challenges facing arts organizations and artists. We donate our time, services and a portion of profits to these venues across the world, who work with limited resources to provide memorable, creative learning experiences. Museum and gallery partners also directly contribute to all aspects of Smartify’s development – they generate and direct content, they advise on user experience, and they oversee new features.

Second Canvas Mauritshuis, renders Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and ‘The Garden of Eden’ by Rubens en Brueghel to zoom in on the brushstrokes of the paintings in Gigapixel. This is the first app in the world to offer Gigapixel integrated infrared images, which take users below the surface a painting revealing to layers and millimeter-sized details that are not normally visible to the naked eye. The Mauritshuis has joined forces with an innovative digitization company, Madpixel, to bring part of the collection to a broader audience in an entirely new way.