By now, many of us are familiar with Electric Objects (EO). The company produces electronic screens designed to display art. That art can come from the pictures you take on your phone, but it can also come from Art Club, a subscription based service that gives subscribers access to everything from classic works of art to new commissioned work made by contemporary artists.
According to EO, the goal of the product is to make art more accessible—an end they learned was desirable when their 2014 Kickstarter campaign raised close to $800,000 of their $25,000 goal. Just how accessible does this make art? There’s no shortage of debate on that subject amongst our friends on Facebook, but in our books, Art Club made a big jump in that department today.
This morning, the company launched “All the Vermeers” a collection featuring all 35 paintings from the famed 17th-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. That’s no small deal. Aside from these paintings being amongst the most skillfully rendered in all of art history, his body of work is split between 13 different museums across Europe and the U.S. Individually, each painting is worth millions of dollars, making a show of his full body of work prohibitively expensive for most museums.
“The story of Vermeer appealed to us because, despite his fame, he only painted 35 paintings and they’ve never been displayed in the same place all at once,” EO Head of Product Luke Chamberlin, mastermind behind “All the Vermeers”, told me over email. (He added that the Frick Collection in New York managed to assemble 18 a few years ago, which they think is the record.)
Long story short, this isn’t a digital collection you can assemble on your own with a few Google searches. It requires the work of a team of experts to produce and can only be seen in its entirety with a subscription to Art Club with the help of an Electric Object.
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