High-end art used to be something to appreciate at The Louvre or if you were really rich, to purchase at Sotheby's. But an interesting and largely unknown point is that unlike music, much of the best known artwork is within the public domain, which means that images of it can be used for free. Copyright law allows free use of any material from an artist who has been dead for 70 years or longer. A app called Artkick (www.artkick.com) enables exactly that. Download the free app to your Android or iOS device and immediately have access to images of more than 50,000 paintings, NASA space photos and US Library of Congress nature pictures. If you have an Internet connected TV, you may be able to download the app to your television or get a Google Chromecast dongle, plug it into the HDMI input of the television to stream the content from smartphones and tablets to the television screen using Wi-Fi. You can also use a browser on any PC or MAC to act like an Internet connected TV and display the images. In the Artkick app some of the paintings available on the “Most Valuable Paintings” list include: $1,000,000,000: “Mona Lisa,” by Leonardo da Vinci $269,400,000: “The Card Players,” by Paul Cezanne $200,000,000: “The Concert,” by Johannes Vermeer $200,000,000: “The Wedding Dance,” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder $155,800,000: “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” by Gustav Klimt $150,000,000: “Self-Portrait (with straw hat),” by Vincent van Gogh $141,500,000: “Bal du Moulin de la Galette,” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir $122,200,000: “The Scream,” by Edvard Munch $109,400,000: “Irises,” by Vincent van Gogh $99,700,000: “Massacre of the Innocents.” by Peter Paul Rubens $90,000,000: “The Visitation,” by Rembrandt $87,500,000: “Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu des Lauves,” by Paul Cezanne $86,200,000: “Water Lily Pond,” by Claude Monet $85,000,000: “Still Life, Drapery, Pitcher and Fruit Bowl,” by Paul Cezanne With your smart phone or tablet you choose what to display within your TV “frame.” Show one visual masterpiece for a long time or “play” a wide range of included Viewlists in the app as slideshows. Images can be set to change every ten minutes or at longer intervals. You can even create your own Viewlists and share them with friends. And you can add your own paintings or photographs to a Viewlist. Version 2.0 of Artkick supports importing images from Flickr, Facebook, Instagram and Smugmug. It's planned to add other online photo sites over time. Want to expand your family's art history knowledge? Then play Artkick as an informal game. Project images on your TV screen and ask players to identify the images. The app gives information about each picture. For the future, premium content may be added, which could include images from modern painters and photographers. The company also would like to work with new and emerging artists to help them to show and sell their work via Artkick.
