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.

Cruise Internet to evaluate art's worth

One of the common questions I receive as a gallery owner is, 'How much is this painting

worth?'

Lots of people have bought paintings or received them from family members and feel that

they own something of great value and want to cash in. We hear stories of lost

paintings found in attics going to auctions and bringing in millions of dollars. It's a

nice dream but you have a better chance at winning the 649 than finding a lost Picasso.
So how do you find out what Great Aunt Matilda's painting is worth?

One of the ways to get an accurate value of a painting is to take it to an appraiser

like Lindland & Associates in Calgary where they will give you a professional appraisal

of the work for around $500. If you're unwilling to go through that hassle, the

Internet is your best resource.

The first thing I do is Google the name of the artist under 'images' and see what comes

up. If a number of the artist's paintings pop up on the screen right away, you're in

luck.
From there it's just a matter of following the links to the artist's art dealers and

finding a painting of similar quality that is for sale. Bingo! You have found the

painting's approximate market value.
Another way to asses the worth of a painting is to look up the artist on the web and

see if you can find out anything about the artist's history.

The worth of a painting doesn't always have to do with the artist's artistic merit,

more often than not it has to do with branding. That means, did the artist receive

professional training and where? Have they had any big shows like at the Vancouver Art

Gallery? Does Arnold Schwarzenegger own one of their pieces? Does the artist have any

art dealers? Or did the artist recently die in a plane crash? All of these things can

really push up the value of a painting.

If your search on the web turns up nothing then the dollar value of the paintings is

worth whatever it sells for. Generally, I discourage people from selling off their

family heirlooms, instead sharing the artwork with a close friend or another family

member is a much better way to go if you absolutely must let go of the piece. Often

museums will take and care for donations of artwork because their historical

importance.

I personally feel the value of a painting goes much further than it's monetary worth. I

have many paintings in my home that are not my own and I absolutely love them. My art

collection started when I was around 17 and I came home to visit my parents while they

were getting ready for one of their many garage sales. I rescued two oil paintings out

of the garbage done by my Great, Great Uncle Peter dated 1912. I still have the

paintings today, and while they're not really worth anything, to me they are priceless!
———
Artist Karla Pearce returns to the Times with her column, the Creative Edge. The

Creative Edge will run on the second and fourth Monday of each month.