Essential media about the arts

At The British Library Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination (until 13 March) is an exhibition of medieval bibles and prayer books, histories and genealogies. Many are objects of astounding beauty, as well as being of profound historical significance. Complementing the compelling show there’s an iPad app with multiple images drawn from fifty-eight of the manuscripts. The app does one thing brilliantly well, but in other ways it’s disappointing. Another current exhibition with its own app is Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (until 22 January). Created with the same mobile content system, toura, this app is both more engaging (filmmaker John Waters acts as host) and somehow more substantial. Taken together, they are a good introduction to the state of the app for major exhibitions.

As might be suggested by the pricing at £3.99 in the Apple store, the Royal Manuscripts app sits somewhere between a marketing pitch and an editorial offering of substance. Too expensive to be the former and in some ways too slight as the latter, it’s an unsatisfactory hybrid. Perhaps ‘slight’ is unfair as a description, given that the app does feature 500 glorious hi-res images, but it’s the complementary material, the text and the navigation, that falls short.

Let’s celebrate, however, what the app does wonderfully well. Which, unsurprisingly, is to approximate the experience of holding a page of one of these manuscripts. Most of the rich single-sheet reproductions fit the screen in portrait configuration perfectly, and give you something of the sense that in your hand is a fragment of, say, the Bedford Psalter Hours. This feeling fundamentally changes how you relate to the pages.

Other means of mechanical reproduction cannot do this nearly so well. High-end printed facsimiles are even more successful, of course, but more conventional books surround reproductions with clutter, and you are usually unable to isolate a single page. Clearly reproductions on television and the web distance you even more from the original pages. And in this context, this idea of your hand experiencing a page is immensely important, since most of the volumes on display were intended to be touched and held, even if only by very elevated fingers.

In the app you can zoom on these images and move across their surface, but nothing is as satisfying as looking with care and concentration at a single page sitting across the full spread of your hand-held screen. The size of an individual manuscript is lost, however, although you can get a sense of how large or small are six of them in short videos included in the app. But I wish a more elegant graphical solution could have been found to suggest relative dimensions.

The videos are pretty well hidden in the app – you have to click through the “Information” button on the home page – and the experience overall is clunky. It’s as if the images (and, once again, they are spectacular), along with minimal text, have been shoe-horned into a pre-existing template, and there is little of the elegant design and intuitive navigation that you find, for example, in apps like The Waste Land from Touch Press. (Illuminations is working with Touch Press on a number of forthcoming apps, so bear that in mind as you read my criticism here.)

The Maurizio Cattelan: All app encourages exploration more easily. Video is much more central to the experience, with a welcome from John Waters, an introduction to the prankster artist by curator Nancy Spector and some twenty contributions from gallerists, curators and friends. At the centre of the app is a simple interface that replicates the astonishing assembly of Cattelan’s works that he has hung in the spiral of the Guggenheim, and then from this (and in other ways too) you can access informative detailed pages about many of Cattelan’s provocations from the past two decades and more. By contrast, what text there is in Royal Manuscripts has the feel of wall labels and offers few points of entry for the curious user with little or no prior knowledge of the subject.

Like the app for Royal Manuscripts, the Maurizio Cattelan: All app retails as a £3.99 download. For different reasons (the images in the former, the overall experience of the latter), each is worth the coin. But I’m cautious about these exhibition apps setting the expectations of commissioners and content creators as well as users for future offerings.

As both a consumer and a potential producer, I am happy with a world in which I along with others pay appropriately for high-end digital product (when, that is, I can’t get this for free – as I can with what is still one of the very best cultural apps, Biblion: World’s Fair from the New York Public Library). Given the potential of this brave new world of digital publishing, I would be sorry to see unsatisfactory, cost-driven apps become dominant in the world of museums and galleries. The market, inevitably, will decide on this, but I hope that premium products are not entirely edged out by cheaper and – from my perspective – somewhat compromised ones.

Image: a detail from a manuscript page showing the author Jean de Wavrin presenting his chronicle of English history to Edward IV, who had commissioned it from the Netherlandish artist; courtesy of the British Library. Jean de Wavrin, Recueil des chroniques d’Engleterre, vol. 1, Bruges, c. 1475, Royal 15 E. iv, vol. 1, f. 14.