Zuzanna Stańska is the art historian behind the DailyArt app. Courtesy Apple

When Polish art historian Zuzanna Stańska considered what she could do to make the art world less stuffily academic and more accessible, building an app felt right. She had the requisite knowledge and she’d already been creating apps for museums, so bootstrapping her own art-focused app wasn’t too much of a stretch. In 2012, DailyArt hit the app stores, and with it, an elegant solution to an industry-wide problem: getting more people to engage with fine art, no PhD or a VIP pass to Art Basel necessary.

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While art apps come and go, Stańska’s has likely had such staying power because it turns interacting with art into a relatively quick daily ritual. Every day, users are presented with a single work of art and a concise but compelling backstory—some written in-house by DailyArt’s team of art historians, others provided by institutions. They can, of course, dig more deeply into a work or artist or movement if time permits. If it doesn’t, the app will serve up another bite-sized bit of art history the next day and every day after that.

Stańska initially launched DailyArt in English, but user adoption took off once she started adding more languages. Today, users can access the app in twenty-four languages, and while the lion’s share of downloads come from China and the U.S., there are more than 800,000 active users all over the world.........

© Observer