ArtArc
The Story of Art
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
ArtArc Plus is here: unlock Style Detective, Compare Mode and every hotspot. Monthly, annual or once - 500,000 years of art, still fully offline.
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/
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Thanks for downloading ArtArc. This update includes refinements on iPad, performance improvements and a handful of small fixes.
Also in this update:
• iPad layouts adapt to orientation: portrait leads with hero artwork, landscape centres the columns
• The hotspot explorer opens as a full page on iPad, in a two-column layout that never scrolls
• Unrevealed gallery cards are tappable, they take you to the milestone, or explain how to reveal it
• About and Plus are reachable from Art Passport
• The timeline keeps its place when you switch sections
The developer, Chris Nagy, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Chris Nagy
- Size
- 28.6 MB
- Category
- Education
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 18.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 18.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 18.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 15.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 2.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
13+
- 13+
- Infrequent
Realistic Violence
Sexual Content or Nudity
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- ArtArc Plus Lifetime $29.99
- ArtArc Plus Annual $22.99
- ArtArc Plus Monthly $2.99
- Copyright
- Developer: Chris Nagy © 2026