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| Success beyond our wildest dreams, by ARC Staff |
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ARC Chairman Fred Ross, with a nod to The Field of Dreams, said it this way: “If we build it, they will come.” And what we built has become one of the finest and most comprehensive internet museums in the world. Our collection of thousands of 19th century masters is second to none. Thousands of masterpieces, consigned to museum basements by Modernist curators, have been rescued from oblivion thanks to ARC's efforts. And they are now being given royal treatment: We are the only site to offer high-resolution scans of these works for the benefit of students, scholars, educators, and historians, who would otherwise have been forced to travel the globe to see these works in comparable detail. At our current rate of growth, it is estimated that this year our website will receive more than twice as many visitors as the National Gallery in Washington. ARC is tracking at the unbelievable pace of 334,000,000 hits per year from over 5,200,000 visitors. Consider this: that’s the same number of visitors as came to the Metropolitan Museum in all of 2003. And that’s if we don’t have any more growth. If we factor in our current growth rate, we project 9,460,000 visitors in 2004 with more than 584,000,000 hits. If we were to slow to half our current growth rate, we project by the year 2010 that ARC will enjoy 37,000,000 visitors per year delivering 3.5 trillion hits per year. Thousands of letters have poured in clearly proving that most people support the ARC Philosophy, the single most popular part of our website. Attracting over 10,000 readers each and every month ... it has become required reading in art and humanities courses around the world. A century ago there were thousands of schools, called 'ateliers', teaching the best traditional techniques of drawing and painting. Through the 20th century they nearly vanished, with only a tiny number continuing with just a few students. By the time ARC started promoting them there were only 16 ateliers we could identify, with perhaps only 200 students. Since then those original 16 have increased their enrollments by 400%, and the number of ARC Approved institutions has grown to 53 with 3000+ enrolled students. ARC Approval is clearly a more reliable indicator than any other for those looking for outstanding instruction, and each and every one of those 53 schools offers a better education in fine art than absolutely any one of the thousands of college and university art departments. ARC Scholarships totalling nearly $30,000 have now been awarded to 3 rounds of winners in as many years. The First International ARC Salon(tm) attracted an extraordinary 1100+ entries. The 100 finalists have been published on our website, among whom more than $25,000 in prizes were awarded. The ARC Living Masters(tm) Gallery, now exhibiting 38 of the greatest talents alive today, is about to be expanded by several more brilliant artists that we have recently identified from among the ARC Salon participants. We were also the first to publish not only complete biographies of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Godward, by world-expert Vern Swanson; we also republished the very rare The Painter in Oil, by Bouguereau student Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst. This book, sought by thousands of art students, had been out of print for over a century. It is now freely available to another generation of painters. The Best of ARC has recently been added to the site: with expert commentary and philosophical analysis of everything from questions of aesthetics, to rare technical information, to ongoing debates about the meaning and value of art to society and the educational development of our children, it provides an invaluable resource for all art-lovers. Can there be any doubt? The Art Renewal Center is helping to revolutionize the entire art world, which is ready, willing, and able for a major cultural shift. People are yearning for beautifully crafted poetic works about humanity. Nothing less will do.  | |
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