Random Acts of Art

A quiet pocket museum for your phone. One curated artwork at a time, drawn from the Met's open collection. No ads. No accounts. No algorithm. Just you and the art.

Random Acts of Art is a quiet, ad-free pocket museum for your phone.

Swipe once. See a beautiful, curated artwork from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's open collection. Swipe again. See another. Each piece you save becomes a small personal gallery you can keep coming back to. That's the whole app.

We built Random Acts of Art for the in-between moments — waiting for coffee, riding the train, lying in bed before sleep. The slots that usually go to scrolling. The idea is simple: instead of a feed designed to keep you anxious, a quiet surface that offers a single beautiful thing and asks nothing of you.

The Met has put more than 200,000 public-domain works online. Almost nobody ever sees them. The famous paintings get the postcards and the lines; the rest of the collection — the Hokusai prints, the Assyrian lions, the Vermeer interiors, the Mughal miniatures, the Benin bronzes, the Iroquois beadwork — sits quietly in storage. Random Acts of Art is a way to meet that other 99 percent, one piece at a time, in an order that never repeats.

Open the app and a curated artwork is already on screen. Swipe for another. Each piece arrives with the artist, the date, the medium, the place; enough to ground you, never enough to lecture. When something stops you, tap the heart. The app remembers it forever, in full resolution, on your device. Pinch to zoom into a brushstroke and the interface fades away; just you and the surface of the paint, the weave of a textile, the carved edge of a stone. Pull up the info panel for a fuller note when you want one. Send a piece you love to a friend as a small art card, the artist and title carried with the same care a wall label would carry them.

There are no ads. No accounts. No tracking. The only data the app sends home is anonymous crash reports and anonymous usage counts — both unlinked to you, neither used for advertising, neither shared with anyone. No name, no email, no location, no profile, no device fingerprint, no advertising ID. There is no subscription, no in-app purchase, no notification, no streak, no leaderboard, no social feed, no "for you." We do not want a relationship with your attention. We want to hand you a beautiful thing and get out of the way.

If you would stop in front of a painting at a museum but you do not follow the art world; if you have ever uninstalled a feed app to feel a little more like yourself; if you want screen time that gives something back instead of taking — this app is for you.

All artworks are public-domain works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access initiative, released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies and federated by Wikimedia Commons, Art Resource, and launch partners. Random Acts of Art is independently made and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Made with care by a small studio. We hope you find something you love.