Art gallery uses RFID to convert visitors to customers
posted April 29th 2005 8:31PM
This one goes out to all of you shy would-be patrons of the arts. Granite State MetalWorks, an art gallery and studio in Littleton, N.H., is making use of RFID tags to convey information about the individual pieces to visitors and potential customers. Using the Art-FID system from Sapago, the RFIDs are placed beside works in the gallery, and visitors use a pen-shaped tag reader in combination with a Dell Axim handheld to read a piece's unique ID number and call up its information. While this would be a convenient system on its own in that ars gratia artis sort of way, let's remember the business end of art and realize there's an ulterior motive here — gallery owners hope to convert more visitors into customers by removing the often uncomfortable act of having to ask curators or staff about pricing.
That would be 'ars artis gratia', if you want the Latin to be correct.
How's that work? Latin uses inflection, not word order, to determine meaning. To translate: ars, nominative and thus the subject of the sentence, 'art'; gratia, ablative and so in this case probably 'for', 'favor' but in this case probably closer to 'sake'; artis, genitive which denotes possession, 'art' once more. Thus, 'art for the sake of art,' and it remains so no matter how you shift the words around.
That is interesting, I don't really buy art but it would be nice to have something like that at other stores, Best Buy, CompUSA
Why can't they just put a little piece of paper next to the piece displaying the price? Every art gallery I've ever been to does it that way. Seems unnecessary to waste money on a handheld/system, but maybe there's something I'm missing?
The gallery that uses it:
http://www.granitestatemetalworks.com/gallery.shtml
What Terrible, crappy amateur art.
The Delly axim is worth more than the art
That last comment about the Latin is incorrect. The construction used is indeed one of the few that relies on word order. The genitive *followed* by either 'causa' or 'gratia' indicates a translation 'for the sake of...' This is not the only instance where word order in Latin matters; for instance, the relative phrase must always *follow* the relative pronoun, and prepositions phrases must always *follow* the preposition, subordinate clauses must always *follow* their subordinator. This is simply one of those times.
Actually, getting people to talk to the gallery staff is the whole point of not having prices on the work (well that and it is just down right snooty). It gives the gallery staff an opening to start a dialog as to why they should buy. Not to mention, it is easier to change the price based on what the customer has on his/her feet. But, back when I owned a gallery, I always had the price on the work because I did not want to be a snooty SOB or use any cheap sales tricks. But that's me, just a regular SOB.
How long 'til you can stand in the art gallery with your axim, call up the information about the work that you're interested in, and then pay for the piece over a wireless connection with your platinum amex, all without talking to a person at all?
The subject of the price of the piece is a tiny element of the Art-FID system. The goal is to make people feel comfortable by putting the tools to ask the major questions in their hands. The system will tell you about the piece, its medium, style, the artist's background and can be a mechanism to hav ethe artist speak directly to the customer about the piece directly, through audio and video.
We built this to engage visitors who ordinarily dont know what to ask or prefer not to ask preliminary things about a piece for fear of being pressured or revealing what they dont know about art.
Gallery owners can include the price or not in the system the same way they decide if the price should appear on the placard.
It would be interesting if the customer could provide feedback on the artwork (with comments filtered by the gallery owner), although this might be more appropriate in a museum.
I suppose a bidding system could be set up as well.
Here is an update on the product. It won Best in Show at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner COnference in Minneapolis this year in the small business division, a show with 1800 companies competing. Also, The Crafts Report named it one of "5 Gadgets Your Business Can't Live Without"