These days you can find just about anything on your smart phone and now you can add local art to the list.
A newly launched app by the Lowell Art Collective places the city’s galleries, museums and artist studios conveniently into the palm of your hand.
“If you’re not familiar with Lowell, finding where all the art is can be kind of like a treasure hunt,” says Coleman Rogers, a Lowell photographer who put the new “m’app” mobile app together.
The Lowell arts m’app connects users to more than two dozen local art destinations and also provides a description of galleries along with maps, hours of operation, phone numbers and web links.
Nothing separates “New Lowell” from “Old Lowell” quite like the Lowell Art Collectives’s new IPhone App. Not so much for our overall indifference towards local (or any) arts, but more lack of any connection whatsoever to our “Old Lowell” world. It just seems like my place here to offer a couple critiques.
For one, distances to galleries are useless unless they’re measured in “Distance From Molly Kay’s (DFMK).”
Among my tribe, your far more likely to hear “Let’s get cocked and go look at Art” than, “Let’s go look at Art.” I don’t know the first thing about coding apps, but this but seems like a quick, obvious fix to me.
Secondly, once you get us to these places, then what? It should be known that despite our lack of depth with regard to subject, “Old Lowell” assumes that all art is accidental and/or can be recreated by any chap that spent a minimum of two semesters in Sullivan School art classes. We’ve got to be impressed. How about some facts about the pieces, the artist, and the inspiration? Asking us to interpret the piece on our own is a deal breaker….
At that, perhaps we should also add “Distance Back to Molly Kays (DBTMK).
Sons of Franky Cabot 