
Show HN: Artpip – 4k fine art for your desktop - mcjiggerlog
https://www.artpip.com
======
kovrik
Artpip is great, use it for months now, really love it!

There is one thing though: I also have LittleSnitch installed and it shows
that Artpip often tries to connect to direct IPs.

Personally, I don't like giving apps permissions to connect to some random
IPs.

Would be nice if it used something more meaningful, like images.artpip.com.

~~~
mcjiggerlog
Images should be behind images.artpip.com, e.g.
[https://images.artpip.com/artist-images/s0/Y6/jG-
small.jpg](https://images.artpip.com/artist-images/s0/Y6/jG-small.jpg)

I'll take a look into what's causing that.

~~~
ConfucianNardin
All the IPs that images.artpip.com resolves to are missing reverse (PTR)
records.

------
mcjiggerlog
Creator here!

Artpip started off as a side project to help me learn a bit more about art in
general and has grown from there. It's been great fun making it and I have
learnt A LOT about art history in the process. I can now recognise a lot of
painters and have got pretty good at dating/categorising paintings (compared
to before, at least!).

Happy to answer any questions.

~~~
cocacola1
Any resources you can suggest to learn more about art history? Preferably some
books as well.

I like the idea, though. I don't really look at my desktop very often, but
this might give me that push.

Question on the project, though. Whenever I step away from my laptop for a
minute, I have a hot corner to display a screen saver. Any way of using this
as a substitute for the screen savers, so it'll just cycle art?

~~~
jdgiese
I recommend reading "The Story of Art" by Gombrich. It is very well written,
although perhaps it should have been called "The Story of Western Art".

~~~
mcjiggerlog
I was going to recommend the same book. It's a pretty good starting place.

I've also enjoyed Theories of Modern Art by Chipp [1]. Gives a great insight
into the mind of the artist.

[1]
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93073.Theories_of_Modern_...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93073.Theories_of_Modern_Art)

------
visarga
I made a similar project for myself. Downloaded a bunch of painting torrents
and set them as auto-changing backgrounds at interval of 5 minutes. For about
2 years I set a second monitor to work as a museum tour - to walk me through
art. I watched Hermitage, Sotheby's and another one with 50K paintings on
random mode.

An important feature was that I engraved the name of the author and painting
on the images themselves in order to remember what I like most (hint:
Hermitage is full of excellent portraits of russian aristocracy). After some
time, visual detail begins to open up and art appreciation increases. We just
need exposure.

------
dheera
I had a lot of hope I could install it with pip ... and then found it was only
for Windows and Mac -__-

It would be really awesome if it worked like this:

    
    
        sudo pip install artpip
        artpip install starry-night

~~~
helb
Well, you can run something like

    
    
        curl http://artpip.com/api/featured |
        jq ".artworks[0].url" |
        xargs -n1 curl > /tmp/wall.jpg &&
        feh --bg-fill /tmp/wall.jpg
    

via crontab every morning or so. But the dev(s) might not be happy about it
(although the image itself is downloaded from Wikimedia, not artpip.com).

~~~
Foxboron
Improved it a little bit. Selects a random image from the feature list.

    
    
      #!/bin/bash
      curl -s http://artpip.com/api/featured |
      jq -r '.artworks | map(.url) | join("\n")' |
      shuf -n 1 |
      xargs curl -s > /tmp/wall.jpg &&
      feh --bg-fill /tmp/wall.jpg

~~~
helb
Heh, i ended up doing that, too. It's possible to just replace

    
    
        jq ".artworks[0].url"
    

with

    
    
        jq ".artworks[$((RANDOM % 5))].url"
    

…at least in bash and zsh. But your version will work better if there ever are
more (or less) than 5 featured items.

------
tomkinstinch
Nice! Similar to a side project of mine that I have sadly had little time to
improve: [http://artfulmac.com](http://artfulmac.com)

The bandwidth costs have become noticeable for me, so that's something to
watch out for.

~~~
zzzmarcus
I hope you can keep it going! I've been an Artful user for quite awhile and
really appreciate it.

------
graysonk
I was really excited for this, but it is just a wrapper for the Google Art
project. I am not really sure how you got the rights to be able to sell prints
of these, or why you want to charge $9.99 a month for a pro version, but good
luck!

~~~
graysonk
Ah, okay you are able to print them because some are public domain. But it
doesn't look like all of them are? Looking at the category that I am guessing
you pulled these from
([https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_Art_Proje...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_Art_Project)),
some have pretty restrictive rights.

One of your recently featured artworks
([https://www.artpip.com/artwork/57a4cf0970f12152abacdf78](https://www.artpip.com/artwork/57a4cf0970f12152abacdf78))
seems to be owned by the Van Gogh Museum and needs a license to be printed. If
I wanted to order a print of that, do you have the correct license?

~~~
mcjiggerlog
Most of the images have been sourced from wikimedia and are all considered in
the public domain.

See [1] for an example of wikimedia's position on licencing:

'The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful
reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public
domain".'

Also, it's a $9.99 one-off payment, not monthly. Serving tens of thousands of
high-res images a day adds up, so there's some extra paid features there for
those that particularly enjoy the app and feel like supporting the project.

[1] [https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-
_Starry_...](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-
_Starry_Night_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)

~~~
firmgently
So that means "if the artwork is public domain, a faithful reproduction/photo
of it is also public domain". But if the original artwork is not PD it's not
covered by that statement.

I can imagine a situation where an artwork is copyrighted but someone takes a
photo of it and uploads it to Wikimedia saying 'here, use my photo'.. but they
don't have rights over the original. Which would be like camming a film in the
cinema and saying 'the original is copyrighted but my reproduction is PD'.

Not trying to knock the idea - I'm an artist myself and think anything that
helps spread and communicate art is great - good on you. Just something to
keep an eye on.

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
The painting in grandparent's comment is from 1868, I don't think anyone can
meaningfully claim the copyright to that, no matter how good of a picture they
took.

------
boogdan
I have just installed it and I really love it! I think it's the first app that
convinced me in less than 5 minutes to pay for the premium package. Keep up
the good work.

------
newzzy
I've been using Muzei on Android for years. A pleasant surprise every single
day.

------
fawind
I did a similar side project for the Chrome new tab page once. It uses Wikiart
as a source. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picasso-new-tab-
pa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picasso-new-tab-
page/dlckklnbefkepkjemodnlbjokaimbedb)

------
ruairidhwm
Love it! Great idea having the different periods available, it'll help for
recognition next time I'm in a museum :)

------
boogdan
By the way, the "add to favs" button should also be located directly into the
menu bar dropdown. Right now if I want to mark a wallpaper as a favourite, I
have to:

1\. Click on the menu bar icon 2\. Click on the "Show artpip" 3\. Wait for the
app to load 4\. Click on the fav button.

Too many steps...

~~~
mcjiggerlog
It should be in the menu - 3rd from top "Favourite Artwork".

~~~
boogdan
My bad, I thought that it means to display my favourite artwork.

------
ggop
Another source of good images for this program is the Met
[http://www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2017/open-
access](http://www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2017/open-access)

------
roadbeats
I love it! Could you add "og:type" to your pages? This way my art bookmarks
will appear in the visual section in Kozmos
([https://getkozmos.com](https://getkozmos.com))

~~~
mcjiggerlog
Done!

------
ggambetta
Funny to see uruguayan Pedro Figari, of all people, featured today!

------
anotheryou
I whished there was something like this with a modern curation. I'd probably
hate even more pieces, but also have a higher chance to see something
interesting.

------
ryan-allen
You had me at 4k, just signed up for pro :) It's hard to find good 4k desktop
images, and the curated art is quite novel. Awesome!

------
j7ake
Cool work but it seems to break my multiple desktop system... is this
currently compatible with multiple desktops?

~~~
mcjiggerlog
Do you mean multi-monitor or multi-workspace? I use it myself on a multi-
monitor multi-workspace setup, so it sounds like a bug. Bug reports very
welcome at support@artpip.com

------
aorth
Cool! Clearly it is inspired by Muzei for Android—you should at least give a
shout out to them on your homepage.

------
xpaulbettsx
The Windows version doesn't set a setup GIF, so it gets a default GIF. You
should make a nice one :)

------
retrac98
Is this artwork only available at a maximum resolution of 4k, or is that a
guaranteed minimum?

~~~
mcjiggerlog
4k is the maximum size available. If you have a screen with sufficient
resolution, the app will use a 4k image. If you have a smaller screen it will
use a smaller image.

------
archie_peach
This is really great. Would love to see a version available for Smart TVs.

~~~
KingPrad
Art software startups are a tough proposition. Google invests heavily in art
and offers it on Chromecast as a screensaver. Amazon does the same on Fire
Stick. Neither is customizable nor allows any interaction and discovery, but
it's just good enough as free to make it tough to do anything unique at the
consumer end. Art is low on the list of things most people want to access
regularly, let alone pay for.

I had a startup that was working on easy art access. Essentially A Spotify for
Art with both public domain and contemporary art. Decided the market just
isn't there. But may do a Kickstarter of the device or run a simplified
version of the software people could access for free or very cheap and see if
any interest develops.

To elaborate on a tough situation, Google does show some contemporary art in
its Chromecast rotations but the artist is not reimbursed for it. It's all
done in name of publicity. Companies working in this area have a market on one
side of artists who have little money, so you are a cost to them even to
digitize their works. And on payer side you have numerous free art resources
from museums. And Google who uses it as a culture talking point and just-good-
enough feature in their products.

I think there are several markets in art delivery but it will take
connections, money, and luck to prise it open.

~~~
noir-york
> I think there are several markets in art delivery but it will take
> connections, money, and luck to prise it open.

Curious about this. I love art and visit musuems regularly.

The first time I saw a van Gogh at d'Orsay I got goose pimples. A flat 2D
image on my laptop or a TV does not come anywhere close to the experience of
seeing the painting itself.

Aren't musuems the best 'art delivery' mechanism there is?

~~~
KingPrad
It's true, TVs don't have the same experience the painting. However, they
enable a lot of other abilities that let you experience art in a very
different way.

With a 4K screen (even the super-cheap one I bought 3 years ago) and
sufficient scanning resolution you can zoom in and see the paint clinging to
individual fibers of canvas. You can achieve closeness and magnification far
beyond what you can at an art museum. You'll never get that close to a real
van Gogh, breathing on it and with a magnifying glass!

My thinking is education and exploration. There's a to be said for volume in
art viewing too. With the TV+software experience, you can construct
progressions of an artist's work, quickly build visual trees showing change
and relationship of art genres. You can visualize the _genre_ and _time_ in a
way few can at an art museum.

Also think about AR and VR experiences. In the light form, imagine watching
curator talks when they can serve up high-resolution images and zoom in to
specific features, or highlight and "pull out" sections side by side. Or
superimpose their hands to visually guide your eye as it's discussed.

That's where I see the future of art in digital form: bringing it into the
home and school, and augmenting the experience within the museum. TV brings
vast scale and new presentation abilities, which I think will complement the
power and complexity of individual static works.

Then, there is also the ability to deliver art that is not static, which I
think will develop soon. Where the image itself slowly changes either by
artistic effort (strictly dictated change) and algorithmic. I imagine a
Kandinsky-like work that changes subtly over minutes, hours, or weeks.

I'm actually not a big art enthusiast myself. But it turns out I'm extremely
passionate about art presentation and how access and exploration can be
magnified.

Dang, now I want to pick this up again. I'd be interested in talking more, if
you are. I love the subject.

------
Applejinx
As a McMansion Hell fan, I can only say:

An 'an art' app! :)

