How to turn your TV into art

Five ways to do it

1. Buy an art TV

Samsung's The Frame, and art TVs from Hisense and TCL, have a matte screen that looks more like paper than glass, a bezel shaped like a picture frame, and an art mode built in. Nothing else gets as close to a real print on a wall. It does mean buying a new television, and Samsung's Art Store costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year in the US for its full catalogue.

2. Play art videos on YouTube

Free on almost any smart TV: hour-long slideshows of old paintings, made to be left on in the background. You get whatever the channel chose, in the order it chose, with adverts unless you pay for YouTube Premium. Some channels draw a gold frame round each picture, and not every picture is cut to fit the screen.

3. Load art files yourself

Etsy sellers offer bundles of digital art sized for televisions: seasonal sets, vintage paintings, hundreds at a time. You buy the files and put them on the TV yourself, by USB stick or through the TV maker's phone app. Most are made for Samsung's Frame.

4. Show your own photos

Every Apple TV can use your photo library as its screen saver, under Settings, General, Screen Saver. It is free and it is personal. It is not art, and the photos change on the screen saver's schedule rather than yours.

5. Use an art app on a streaming box

Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku and Google TV all have apps that show art on the television you already own. This is the least expensive way to get most of what an art TV does, and it is what Salon does on Apple TV. The art apps, compared.

Setting up an Apple TV for art

Keep the screen awake

An Apple TV starts its screen saver after a few minutes without a button press, and the screen saver takes over whatever was showing. Salon stops that while a picture is hanging, with Keep Screen Awake under Settings, On Screen, which is on from the start. With other apps, lengthen the wait under Settings, General, Screen Saver, Start After.

Check the television's own power saving

Many televisions switch themselves off after a few hours without a button press, whatever is plugged into them. The setting lives in the TV's own menus, not the Apple TV's, usually under a name like auto power off or eco mode.

Turn the brightness down

A picture on a wall is lit by the room; a television at full brightness glows like a window. Lower it until the picture sits at about the brightness of the wall around it, and it starts to read as a print. Many televisions have a picture mode that follows the light in the room.

Mind burn-in on an OLED

OLED screens can keep a faint trace of an image left in the same place for many hours. On an OLED, let the picture change: Salon's slideshow moves through your favourites every minute, five minutes, fifteen or hour. LCD televisions are far less prone to it.

Choose pictures the shape of the screen

A television is 16:9, much wider than it is tall. A portrait either leaves black bars down the sides or loses its top and bottom. Landscapes, seascapes, harbours and street scenes fill the screen naturally, which is why Salon only hangs pictures wide enough to fill it, each one cut to shape by hand.

Making it look less like a TV

• Frame the screen. Frames that fix to the edge of a television with magnets or clips are made for many sizes, and turn the black bezel into a picture frame.
• Put a mat round the picture. A border of plain colour between the picture and the edge of the screen does much of what a mat does in a real frame. Salon has mats in five board colours and three widths.
• Hide the cables. A picture has no wires. Mounting the television flat to the wall, with the cables run behind it, does more than any setting.

Where Salon fits

Salon is the art app route, on Apple TV. It hangs nearly 800 paintings, prints, maps and photographs from the world's great museums and archives, each one chosen by hand and cut to fill a 16:9 screen in 4K. It is a single purchase with no subscription, no account and no adverts, and it works on whatever television the Apple TV is plugged into.