This App Will Change The Way You Buy Art
Even if you've never bought art before.
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Standing in Pace MacGill, an art gallery in midtown Manhattan, the art market researcher-cum-entrepreneur Magnus Resch opened an app on his iPhone and beamed. “Take a picture of an artwork,” he said, handing over his phone, which displayed a salmon-red and white interface bearing the logo “Magnus."
A button on the screen was dutifully pressed, and the artwork in question—a 1973 image by the photographer Hiro, which was presented without a label on the gallery’s wall—appeared, after a beat, on the phone, correctly identified. But the app didn’t just display the artwork; it loaded, unprompted, the photograph’s title, attribution, dimension, price ($20,000), and, further down on the screen, a history of past work and exhibitions by the artist.