Plasma TVs redefining view of fine art
By Leslie Walker
Washington Post
Scott Lipsky thinks you will soon be changing your art as easily and often as you do your music and TV shows.
The 39-year-old Seattle resident is part of the Internet's second wave, an entrepreneur who made a bundle off the dot-com boom and can afford to dig into his wallet to test other ways technology might change our lifestyles.
His latest innovation is a small box that turns plasma TVs into electronic galleries of fine art. RGB Labs Inc., his startup, is selling its Internet-connected "GalleryPlayer" to hotels, restaurants and corporations for display on the walls of lobbies and other high-trafficked spaces. A consumer version is also in the works.
"You have a box that plays movies and a box that plays CDs. Why not a box that plays art?" Lipsky said as he showed off his contraption in a Washington hotel suite last week.
Behind him, glowing digital images of paintings by Renoir, Manet, Cezanne and other great artists cycled slowly on a 50-inch plasma TV screen, each lingering long enough to have impact before dissolving into something new. The luminescent images were finely textured, showing startling details of the brush strokes from the original oils, occasionally zooming in on an apple, say, before pulling back to show an entire still life.
The rotating art display made it clear that RGB Labs was peddling something new. What was not clear was whether anyone would buy it, especially since the player costs $3,000 and the art programming service — refreshed monthly with new images — costs $195 a month.
Paul Brown's law firm in Seattle, Black, Lowe & Graham, is one of RGB's first customers. "We thought it would be kind of neat to have revolving artwork in our conference room," said Brown, a senior partner. "The response has been strong. Everybody stares at it. ... It sets a nice tone; it changes but is not spastic."
Martin Smith Inc., one of Seattle's biggest real estate developers, bought the system for the entrance of its eight-story historic office building. "Everyone who comes into my lobby comments on how wonderful it is," said partner Mickey Smith. "It really looks like a piece of art, not a TV screen."
Skeptics note that plasma TVs are still expensive — the average price is $4,400, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, making them mostly toys for the well-to-do.
Lipsky thinks plasma TVs are at the point where they could spawn new businesses and trigger twists on old ones. He's seen turning points before, once when he was a vice president at Amazon.com before its public stock offering, and again when he started an Internet ad agency, Avenue A, that went public just before the stock market plunged in 2000.
This time he may be on the forward edge of finding ways to reuse display screens. He is not alone, either. Entrepreneur Anthony Wood, who brought the first digital video recorder to market in 1999 under the name ReplayTV, started selling his own high-definition media player last month for $499. His "Roku" device plays art, video or slide shows on high-definition TVs.
Lipsky got his latest idea when he was installing a plasma TV over his living-room fireplace. Like many folks putting in home theaters, he hated the thought of looking at a dark screen when the TV was off. So he went in search of super-high-resolution digital images that he could rotate, as Bill Gates did with his personal collection of digital art displayed on wall-mounted screens at his Seattle mansion.
But Lipsky ran into challenges, including a lack of high-resolution copies of paintings and the absence of software to reformat images to fit big screens. So he and several colleagues engineered an electronic box that automatically reformats images to fit the various screen sizes and shapes. Then they licensed display rights to thousands of images from more than 100 artists from Corbis Inc., the image archive that Gates is affiliated with.
