The Art of the Tablet

In London, Museum visitors are dashing through the Tate Modern, taking in works of art—on their smartphones. During the latest Art Basel art fair in Switzerland, a collector agreed to buy a $250,000 painting—while sitting in a hair salon in Los Angeles, looking at the work on her tablet. These days, anyone with an iPad can create their own Damien Hirst painting, thanks to an app from the Gagosian Gallery, which recently showed the artist's work at its 11 global outposts.

Digital tools are changing the way that art is bought, sold and simply looked at. Collectors who once traveled across the world to art fairs and auctions are buying more works without seeing them in person, relying instead on digital views. Galleries now have the ability to show many more works to interested collectors than they have in their showrooms, simply by swiping through digital inventories. Museums are encouraging visitors to download digital apps to get more information about works on display. Some museum and gallery apps allow visitors to zoom in on a work for a closer look than they would get with the naked eye—a development that will likely be bolstered by Apple's introduction this week of a new iPad with a sharper display screen.

"We're in the midst of a sea change in the way museums relate to their audiences," says Peter Samis, associate curator of interpretive media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "There's this booming demand at the highest level, like trustees are all saying, 'Where's our iPad app?' at every museum, large and small, across America."

Officials at Christie's and Sotheby's say they're seeing more iPads and other devices filling the room during sales. Christie's, which already offers absentee bidding via its website, expects to extend absentee bidding to its iPad app next month, along with new features like access to condition reports on works. Sotheby's just updated its iPad catalog app to allow collectors to take notes in digital catalogs during sales.

Tablets are also increasingly a staple of art fairs. At Art Basel in Switzerland last June, dealer Adam Sheffer, a partner at the New York gallery Cheim & Read, met with a client interested in a work by Ghada Amer, an Egyptian painter whose labor-intensive pieces are filled with intricate embroidery. The gallery's works were inventoried on the iPad using ArtBinder, an app that is swiftly replacing the use of physical binders at art fairs. The Los Angeles-based collector was ready to buy the work, but he wanted the signoff of his wife, who was more than 5,800 miles away in a hair salon in Los Angeles. Mr. Sheffer emailed a close-up of the work to the wife, an art enthusiast, who agreed to the $250,000 sale. "The whole thing took an hour," Mr. Sheffer says.

Miami Beach collector Dennis Scholl says photography and video art are a natural fit when he's considering buying an artwork based on a digital image; for sculpture, with its scale issues, and drawings, with their subtle gradations of shading, he likes to see the works in person. Mr. Scholl recently pulled the trigger on a work by Tamy Ben-Tor, using his iPad to view the video of the Israeli artist as an old woman in a forest. "The iPad, because of the beauty of the images and the clarity of the reproduction, it makes you braver as a collector," he says.

Digital tools can also help collectors organize large inventories they may have stored in locations around the world. Curator Laura J. Mueller tracks more than 700 Japanese works scattered across two homes and a warehouse for a private New York collector by organizing digital images of the pieces using an iPhone and iPad app, Collectrium.

In May, the next edition of the Gagosian app will feature photographer Taryn Simon. A tap on any of roughly 200 photographs by Ms. Simon will take users deeper into the backstory of images from one of her series. Gagosian isn't currently showing Ms. Simon's pieces in its brick-and-mortar galleries, but the app will expose her work to potential buyers.