Art Authority Blog

A major new release of Art Authority for iPad is now available in the App Store, in conjunction with availability of Apple’s new iOS 9. Art Authority 4.10 takes advantage of iOS 9’s greatly enhanced Spotlight search capabilities to let you use Spotlight search to find artists, locations and periods within the app, and to jump directly into the app at the associated show.

This new Spotlight capability will also make it easier to take advantage of the other major new feature in Art Authority 4.10: the addition of over 200 new artists, bringing the total to well over 1300. And these are not just any old artists. We’ve been engaged for almost a year now in an Internet-based scientific study to rate and rank the western world’s most important painters. The study is ongoing, but the 200+ new artists are the first results.

Spotlight search

Spotlight searching has been part of iOS for a long time, but in iOS 9 it can do a whole lot more, including searching within apps that provide the needed support. Just swipe to the right on the home screen (or down from any icon, as in iOS 8) to get to the Spotlight search screen.

Then start typing in your search, and results will appear. Art Authority indexes all of its 1300+ artists and 800+ locations through Spotlight, along with its eight major period rooms.

Tapping on any Art Authority result automatically switches to the app and takes you right to the show on that result.

Art Authority for iPad 4.10 also supports another iOS 9 search-related feature called Universal Links. If you have the app installed, and tap on various links to our community web site (such as one to van Gogh, or the Louvre, or the Baroque period), instead of going to the site, you’ll go to the appropriate place in the app instead, just as with Spotlight search.

New artists (and more!)

Since the first day of the App Store in 2008, Art Authority has endeavored to help users explore the western art world through a carefully curated set of period highlights, artists, and works of art. We have based that curation on various types of Internet analysis, in concert with more traditional art history sources. The procedure for choosing which artists to include, however, has always been somewhat ad hoc and not documented or repeatable. In other words we really couldn’t be sure we were including the most important artists. We probably missed some, and some “less important” artists probably snuck in. (We of course do realize that the term “important” is quite a weighted one, since what is important to some may not be so to others. That is in fact one of the main reasons for our study, to come up with as objective a definition of “important” as we could.)

Since the beginning of the year, we have been engaged in a study to objectively rate and rank the western world’s top painters. And if you think by “top” we mean some sort of elitist club, think again: our study has identified over 20,000 museum-quality western painters for potential inclusion. The study is still underway, and you’ll certainly be hearing more about it in the future (both here and hopefully in an appropriate journal somewhere). For now, we’ve taken over 200 of the top artists from that study who were missing from the app and added them.

And of course when we add artists we include a number of artworks from each of those artists, resulting in an increase of 20,000 works of art which can be accessed by the app (for a total well over 90,000). Much of the credit for adding these additional works goes to the participants in year 5 of our summer intern program.

Details

Art Authority for iPad 4.10 is in the App Store now, and is of course a free upgrade for all current users. Art Authority K-12 for iPad and Art Authority for iPhone 4.10 should be available there shortly, and are also free upgrades. Our free community site includes all the new artists and works.

And in case you’re curious about the new artists, here’s the whole list: