
ArtArc
The Story of Art
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Free
In-App Purchases
About
The everyday person's guide to the story of art - told as one interactive arc.
ArtArc begins half a million years ago with a zigzag carved on a shell, and ends with pictures conjured from words. Twelve chapters, sixty-six moments, each one a story you can read in a minute.
Then the app asks you to do more than scroll:
* Play Style Detective, an offline quiz that asks you to identify eras, artworks, and turning points from bundled images and clues.
* Build your Art Passport as you visit chapters, read milestones, find artwork details, and improve your Detective score.
* Use Compare Mode to place ideas side by side: Durer's copy panic beside Stable Diffusion, the Sarony photography case beside AI copyright rulings, Duchamp beside the state-fair AI art argument.
* Tap selected artworks for guided hotspots on symbols, composition, technique, and context.
* Reveal Details wallpapers: explore an artwork's hotspots and its museum-grade close-up - cropped from open-access masterpieces at wallpaper resolution - appears in your gallery.
Along the way:
• The Ice Age galleries of Chauvet and Lascaux - and the 1880 scandal when experts refused to believe cave art was real
• Egypt's painters of eternity, Greece's first signed artworks, Rome's painted illusions
• The Renaissance inventions: perspective, oil paint, and the first mass-media copy panic
• Photography's arrival - when critics called the camera "art's most mortal enemy" and courts had to rule on whether a machine's picture could be art at all
• Impressionism (named after an insult), Van Gogh (who sold almost nothing), Duchamp's urinal
• The machine age: the 1965 plotter exhibitions, the program that painted for forty years, and the night two duelling neural networks changed image-making forever
• The prompt era: DeepDream's hallucinations, the $432,500 AI portrait, the astronaut riding a horse, the state-fair prize that started a global argument - and the court rulings deciding, once again, what counts as art
Every image in the app comes from public-domain and museum open-access collections - including landmark AI works that US rulings placed in the public domain - and every one is fully credited on its detail page.
Designed to be felt as much as read: era-themed colours wash the screen as you travel, milestones light up along the timeline's spine, and imagery drifts gently as you scroll. A persistent native menu lets you move between Timeline, Art Passport, Compare, and Style Detective. At home on iPhone and iPad, portrait or landscape.
The full story is free: every chapter, every milestone, every attribution. ArtArc Plus (optional) unlocks unlimited Style Detective rounds, every hotspot pack and Compare pair, and saving Details wallpapers to Photos - with new chapters added in free updates. Available as a monthly or annual subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase. Subscriptions renew until cancelled in Settings.
No account. No ads. No tracking. Everything works offline - the whole story ships with the app.
Made for the curious. No art degree required.
Privacy Policy: https://butterflybombarby.au/artarc/privacy-policy.html
Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
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What's New in ArtArc
1.1
July 14, 2026
Introducing ArtArc Plus - an optional upgrade for the curious. The full timeline stays free, forever. Plus unlocks: • Unlimited Style Detective - no daily limit • Every hotspot detail pack and Compare pair • Saveable Details wallpapers - museum-grade close-ups • New chapters added in free updates Available as a monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-time lifetime unlock. Thanks for exploring the story of art with us.
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In-App Purchases
$29.99
ArtArc Plus Lifetime
Everything in ArtArc Plus, forever. One purchase.





