Samsung’s huge Art Store

Samsung is trying to turn a television subscription into something closer to a rotating private gallery. In April 2026, it said its Art Store had passed 5,000 works from more than 800 artists, a jump from the 3,000-plus works and 1,000-plus artists it cited a year earlier. (news.samsung.com 1) (news.samsung.com 2) This is not a phone app or a website first. Samsung built the Art Store for its televisions, and in 2025 it expanded the service beyond The Frame to Neo Quantum Dot Light Emitting Diode 8K, Neo Quantum Dot Light Emitting Diode 4K, and Quantum Dot Light Emitting Diode sets, saying the service was available in more than 115 countries. (news.samsung.com) The hardware pitch is simple: when the screen is off, it is supposed to look less like a black rectangle and more like wall art. Samsung’s 2026 Frame models pair the store with matte, low-glare displays and flush wall mounting so the art product and the television product sell each other. (news.samsung.com) The content strategy has shifted upward into institutions people already recognize. Samsung says the store now includes collections tied to the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, Art Basel, and, as of March 2026, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (news.samsung.com) (sfmoma.org) That San Francisco Museum of Modern Art deal shows how Samsung is filling gaps in the catalog. The museum added 34 works at launch, including paintings by Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Wayne Thiebaud, Jackson Pollock, and Piet Mondrian, and Samsung called it the first West Coast museum on the platform. (sfmoma.org) At the same time, Samsung is using the art world’s event calendar as programming. Its Art Basel partnership started with Basel, expanded to Miami Beach in December 2024, and brought quarterly curated collections from galleries showing at the fair onto Samsung screens at home. (news.samsung.com) That is why Samsung keeps naming places like Basel, Miami Beach, Paris, and Hong Kong around these releases. Those cities are not random geography; they are stops on the global art-fair circuit, and Samsung is borrowing that circuit’s prestige to make a television catalog feel like a live cultural program. (news.samsung.com 1) (news.samsung.com 2) The company is also widening the mix below the museum tier. On April 8, 2026, Samsung said 180 works by 98 Minted artists would roll into the store after a co-hosted art challenge, adding pieces made specifically for Samsung televisions rather than borrowed from existing museum collections. (news.samsung.com) And it has already tested how far the brand can stretch beyond fine art. In May 2025, Samsung added Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, and National Geographic images in 4K, which means the same subscription that sells Matisse can also sell franchise art to families who would never browse a museum catalog. (news.samsung.com) The scale is starting to look less like a niche feature and more like a media business. Samsung said in April 2025 that Art Store subscriptions had grown more than 70 percent year over year since February 2024, and that subscribers in the United States were viewing more than 400 million hours of art annually. (news.samsung.com) So the story is not just that Samsung has a bigger library now. It is building a paid channel where museums, galleries, independent artists, and entertainment brands all compete for the same wall in your living room, and the wall is a Samsung screen. (news.samsung.com 1) (news.samsung.com 2)