Art Authority Blog
Celebrating two years of (even more) giving back
Free apps! Half off on all prints! This weekend only!
Why? Here at Art Authority we’re proud of how we’ve been giving back to the art community. Starting with an app in the App Store the day that store opened ten years ago, we’ve provided art lovers worldwide with access to over 100,000 classic works of art, university art history classes with (literally) a new way of looking at art, and K-12 teachers with the ability to involve their students with art in age-appropriate ways, including through free lesson plans. We authored a paper on evaluating the importance of art in the Internet era, and are in the eighth year of our summer-intern program for art majors.
And now we have something else to really celebrate:
As of July 22, we’re celebrating two years since we acquired 1000Museums.com and the associated relationships with the artists and institutions that create and care for the art we all love so much. In those two years we have now given back, mainly in the form of royalties on prints we’ve sold, over $250,000. One-quarter of a million dollars has gone to helping current-day artists, artists estates and art museums big and small further their important missions of community, education, preservation and beauty. Some of the relationships we’re most proud of include:
- The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
- The Library of Congress
- I Require Art
- Museum Store Sunday (Charter sponsor)
- The estates of Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse, Jacob Lawrence and others
- Fine Art Custom Printing by R. Mac Holbert
You may be skeptical, but we love paying royalties. We get so much in return, starting with the ability to offer the highest quality curator-approved prints. The more royalties we pay, not only do artists and museums keep doing great things, but the more product that means we’ve sold. And the more product we’ve sold, the more great art is in the hands of our customers, and the more money we have to work with additional museums and pay still more royalties.
We hope to keep this impressive virtuous circle going indefinitely, paying more and more royalties to more and more institutions. As part of that plan, and to celebrate our two-year successes, through July 22 only, we’re putting all prints on 1000Museums.com on sale for an unheard of 50% off.* Please help us give back the next $250,000 and help yourself to some of the best in fine-art reproductions in the process.
Peder Severin Krøyer, Hip Hip Hurrah! Artists’ Party at Skagen, 1888, Goteborgs Konstmuseum
Oh, and the Art Authority apps are free this weekend too 🙂
*First 1000 orders for unframed prints only (custom-framed prints available for 25% off).
Celebrating giving back, part 1
As part of our ongoing 2-year anniversary celebration, the award-winning Art Authority for iPad and iPhone apps are now completely free through this weekend. Just another way we’re giving back to the art community. But free apps are just a very small part of on our giving back, so keep watching this space. Here’s a big hint for you:
Watch this space
Having just celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the App Store and the long, strange trip it started us on, we’re about to celebrate the 2-year anniversary of one of the biggest parts of that trip: our major acquisition of 1000 museums worth of art through 1000Museums.com.
So be sure to watch this space as that date, Sunday July 22, gets closer. You’ll be glad you did 🙂
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch, 1642, Rijksmuseum
Our long, strange, 10-year trip
Ten years ago, on July 10 2008, Apple rolled out the App Store. It sure has been a long, strange trip for us here at Art Authority LLC since then.
In 2008 we were Open Door Networks, founded in 1995 as a dial-up internet provider, and known mainly for developing Macintosh network utilities like the DoorStop Personal Firewall.
The iPhone of course changed everything. When introduced the year before, Apple didn’t allow developers to provide software for it, but they quickly saw the error of their ways and the rest is most certainly history. We couldn’t resist the opportunity to develop iPhone apps, and our iEnvision Web-image browser app was available on day one in the “iTunes App Store” ten years ago.
iEnvision included “bookmarks” to five categories of image sites that we thought displayed particularly well on the iPhone: comics, space photos, newspaper front pages, children’s books and… art! It was a great start for us, and within a month, we broke out the individual built-in categories from iEnvision into individual apps, which we called “Envi apps.” There was “Comic Envi,” “Space Envi”, “News Envi”, “Kid Book Envi” and… “Art Envi.” Many other Envi’s soon followed.
The App Store was a huge success, as was Art Envi in particular. When Apple announced the iPad in early 2010, it was a no-brainer what we were going to implement on Apple’s next groundbreaking device: art, art, art. Art Authority in particular. Art Authority for iPad took Art Envi to the next level, with dozens of times the number of artists and the amount of art, many more ways to search and access the art, and a professionally-designed virtual museum interface. The result: “an experience unlike any other” (the NY Times), which has often sold as the #1 reference app in the App Store. We are proud to have, literally and figuratively, changed art history with our art apps.
Our transition from Macintosh network experts to Art Authority was just getting started. The Art Authority app’s widespread acclaim was noticed by a number of real art authorities, including the Getty Museum’s Stanley Smith and digital printing guru R. Mac Holbert. In early 2016 we got together with Stanley, Mac and other art authorities to form Art Authority LLC. The company had become the app.
Our trip didn’t stop there. E-commerce company Project A had long been associated with Open Door’s efforts, and with their e-commerce know-how, Stanley and Mac’s printing expertise and the app’s access to 100,000+ works of art, we had everything we needed to move Art Authority beyond the app world into selling museum-quality reproductions. Many companies had gone from physical goods to electronic; we went from electronic to physical goods.
The final piece of the puzzle (so far) fell into place when we acquired the assets of art e-commerce pioneer 1000Museums. 1000Museums.com remains the principal site for selling our (physical) wares, and the museum relationships that the site has helped nurture look to be the next big step in what has certainly been a very long, strange 10-year trip. All started by Steve Jobs, the iPhone, and the App Store.
Happy Anniversary!