Stories behind art treasures such as Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus in the Louvre and a 19th-century relief of Phaeton driving the Chariot of the Sun at the Royal Academy of Arts are to made free for the rest of the year by the world’s most downloaded museum app.
Smartify is often known as the “Shazam for art” app in that it allows people to identify works of art by simply scanning them on a smartphone. It has about 2 million artworks from more than 120 venues.
It also has audio and visual museum tours which are a mix of paid and free depending on the museum or exhibition.
Photo: AFP
Because no one will be seeing the Mona Lisa in Paris or the Laughing Cavalier at the Wallace Collection in London any time soon, Smartify said it would make all its audio tours free for the rest of the year.
Exhibitions that were due to open, but have been closed because of coronavirus, will also be launched on the app as audio and visual tours.
The Smartify app was founded in the UK as a social enterprise by four friends in 2017. Anna Lowe, one of the co-founders, said the mission had always been about supporting museums and increasing access to art.
“We started with around 30 museums, predominantly in the UK, and now we’re global with 2 million artworks and we are the world’s most downloaded museum app.”
The job now was to help make sure museum collections were as accessible as possible, she said.
“Obviously we have seen a change in the way the app is used,” she said. “We started the app from a love of visiting museums and galleries and seeing and connecting with art. At times like this, really strange times, people look to art and music and culture for inspiration, solace a sense of normal.”
Many galleries are now adding tours for exhibitions that have closed.
They include the Watts Gallery-Artists’ Village in Surrey, which closed one week into its new exhibition exploring the art critic John Ruskin.
The Museum of London is soon to add an audio tour of its Clash: London Calling display. All the objects in the show are already listed on the app.
The Lowry in Salford and Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire are also working on new tours that will be added soon.
Among the audio and visual tours now free to listen is one by Mary Beard, a mythology trail through the RA’s collection, and a masterpieces of the Louvre tour which takes people from the Great Sphinx of Tanis to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and The Virgin of the Rocks.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located