The Framer

THE PROJECT

I have a Frame TV on the wall. It will show anything you give it, which sounds like freedom and is actually the problem. Samsung will sell you art for it, and meanwhile the museums have spent years scanning their collections into the public domain. Millions of works, and almost none of them end up on anyone's wall.

So I started by getting hold of all of it, which turned out to be the easy half. Open a museum's API and everything arrives at once: masterpieces filed beside catalogue cards, cracked varnish, photographs of frames, and thousands of small brown studies nobody would live with. An ocean is not a gallery. The thing I was actually building was the part that throws almost all of it away.

The piece the whole thing hangs on is the refusal. Twenty-odd collections go in, every work gets looked at, and one only comes back out if it still holds together seen from across a room. Very few do. Being willing to lose that much is what makes the handful that survive worth hanging.

The second decision was to stop asking anyone to choose. Browsing a catalogue is work, and nobody does it twice. You favourite a few pieces, it reads what they have in common, and after that the wall changes by itself and gets closer to you as it goes.

The last one was to treat a painting as something to prepare rather than something to display. Each is cropped to the shape of your frame, colour-matched to the panel, and given a real mat and moulding before it goes up. That is the difference between a picture on a screen and a picture on a wall, and it is most of why people stop noticing the television is there.

It runs at home on my own Frame TV, installed the way a customer installs it rather than from my checkout, which is how the things that actually break get found. Every painting arrives with its artist, its title and the museum it hangs in, so what is on the wall is always something you can name.