Art Vote
artvote.net
artvote.net
This project seems under the misapprehension that there's some kind of "perennial philosophy" of art that can be uncovered by asking enough people about randomly generated images. For one thing, this is absolutely not what I (and, I would argue, pretty much anyone who's spent time thinking about it) consider to be "art". Also, the experience of art is not just pretty pictures, but all of the past experiences that you bring with you when looking at a piece of art. Even people who like what I would consider to be twee pictures do so because of what they're bringing to the aesthetic experience.
If statistically significant results come out of this, I'd argue that any information it generates is going to be extremely shallow. It's like a kind of statistical fetish.
But if statistically significant, it might tell us something more fundamental about the pure aesthetics assigned by people to patterns. It's more like the bouba/kiki experiment.
The mistake to me is in implicating art, instead of just aesthetics. But Art Vote is a lot more catchy than Neurobiology Of Visual Aesthetics From Retina To Occipital Cortex Vote.
Accurate or not, it's a fun project.
I don't know how "technical" or "emotional" that is, but it's certainly art.
I think that might be specific to you, or at least not how everyone appreciate art. My enjoyment of a piece of art is directly linked to how I feel when I see it/think about it. I can enjoy something without explanations and not enjoy something with explanations. I don't think I'm in the minority here.
> If statistically significant results come out of this, I'd argue that any information it generates is going to be extremely shallow. It's like a kind of statistical fetish.
They will be, but not because of the nature of the project, but because of the implementation. There are only a few variations of a few basic things.
> This project seems under the misapprehension that there's some kind of "perennial philosophy" of art that can be uncovered by asking enough people about randomly generated images.
I'm not sure this is a misapprehension. The project itself is limited, but there are information to learn with randomly generated images. If people like art A and not art B, you could generate a graduation of A to B and see if people like art close to A (which could mean they like art "like" A), or if they only like A (which could mean that A has something specific).
Live stats at web scale is a really fun problem to have. Un-optimized, using public cloud infra, round-trip latency for collecting data, calculating statistics, and render/viz to the user, it's shockingly slow! For crowd training Art GANs, latency probably doesn't matter, but seeing the live stats displayed is still magical to me. Imagine how fun ArtVote would be just using the public collection of images from MoMA, seeing the crowd evaluate a new work live ;)
There are so many brilliant sources of understanding on what makes art appealing, and so many images of art on the internet. I don't get why the site would use these drawn-in-ten-seconds-in-mspaint images for voting.
However, even on the currently small response rate, there seems to be some valid patterns emerging...
In the Overlapping Drops results, the red/green images is the clear favorite. This is no surprise, as this antagonist pair is the most favored in art. Around 90% of the paintings in any national collection are painted along the red/green axis.
Neither am I surprised that the most popular Nested Squares results is the one that features the greatest contrast. 'Higher than nature' contrast is a core requirement of art. This is as true in Korean soap opera as it is in visual art.
I believe that the experiment could have been better designed. A better intro to the experiment would have been a good idea. Also, (in my opinion) I believe that the images should have been presented as pairwise comparisons (Thurstone, L.L.: A Law of Comparative Judgment) with a few repeats shown in. The preference choice should be restricted to three from five. This would have made it easier to get more responses from each user. Perhaps it would have been better to have kept the images in their family groups. In that way, it would be more clear what is being tested.
> 'Higher than nature' contrast is a core requirement of art
There are so many counter-examples I don't know where to start. Turner's watercolours. Hiroshi Sugimoto's seascapes. Do So Huh's installations. I mean come on, what about Rauschenberg's White Painting? I suppose if you don't consider anything after the 18th century you might be right, but it feels like you're deliberately narrowing down what you call "art" so you can make confident statements like that.
It is a trivial task to find exceptions to any principle in art. However, as a general rule, it is true that artists exaggerate. My own work examined 100 American paintings all painted at approximately the same time, of similar subject matter. These were compared to the same number of snap-shot style photographs of similar subject matter.
The results showed us that artists exaggerate the strong color differences of nature, yet bring weak differences closer together. Hence an artwork is (in general) an exaggeration in two dimensions: contrast and affinity. This is done differently in the hue, saturation and lightness channels, with (as you might expect) lightness featuring the strongest. However, there were interesting exception in the hue treatment of particular subject matter.
> I suppose if you don't consider anything after the 18th century you might be right.
You have a point, if you only consider fine art, and your examples show that you know your businesses in this domain. But I would say it is even more true of such applied arts as game level design, high vfx fantasy movies, Deviant art style fan art and such like.
The comment "if you only consider fine art" also feels like you're moving the goalposts, where you're saying "within these works of visual art people prefer high-contrast images", but the categorisation of those images is that they're a subset of visual art within which people prefer high-contrast images.
As for the fine art issue…. As the previous poster implied, art pretty much changed form around 150 years ago. It went from being pretty much rule-based to pretty much rule-breaking. It would be a waste of time to apply My own research on art to (for example) Tracy Emins tent or Joseph Beuy’s dead hare.
I always thought that art would be much easier to talk about if we came up with different names for the stuff that was made since Picasso’s gurnicca and the the stuff made before. They are different things, with different functions and it is only confusing that they are both called art.
> When explaining the purpose of his Readymade sculpture, Duchamp stated they are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice."
The important point is the involvement of a person. Computer generated art can't be art unless someone thinks it is.
The only possible conclusion one can draw from this app isn't "what are people's art preferences?", but instead "what are people's drawn-in-ten-seconds-in-mspaint preferences?"
The app would just as accurately gague people's art preferences if it presented only photos of shoes.
The app would just as accurately gague people's art preferences if it presented only photos of shoes.
The "sheep" (https://electricsheep.org/#/sheep) show what this idea can evolve into.
What if the generated art was more something like this?
As the book says, ″There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.″
My impression is that the instantiations of each “piece” tend to all look the same and have similar aesthetic value. Personally I like Nested Squares, 45 Degree Paths, and Bezier Curves when it chooses rainbow colors. On the other hand, Overlapping Drops is fundamentally ugly (looks like a 5-year-old using a paint program’s stamp tool) and Patterned Lines is usually ugly (too many lines, too much contrast, no antialiasing, reminds me of the Windows pipes screensaver). But I feel like both the good and bad come mostly from the human who wrote the program, not the random generation itself.
For me, it is hard to judge these pieces of art in the vacuum.
There are clear tendencies there regarding colours, contrast and complexity, and they do provide some (limited) insight into what viewers expect in art.