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Art Vote

artvote.net

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Re: Art Vote

#11

Post by frereubu »

I studied photography and sculpture, and initially the only thing that made any difference to whether I enjoyed a piece of art was interpretation by someone who's seen a lot of art. There were only two or three people who could do this effectively for me. Eventually, after talking to them a lot and seeing a lot of art, and thinking about it deeply, you start to develop your own tastes, and realise what kinds of things speak to you.

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.

Re: Art Vote

#12

Post by comex »

Every image it generates is one of 8 “pieces”, where each “piece” is an algorithm that has some randomness but a predetermined basic design. [1]

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.

[1] https://artvote.net/about

Re: Art Vote

#15

Post by frereubu »

Daub wrote: post #10
cush wrote: post #6

I don't see what this could possibly tell us about art. The generated images are both too random, but also have absolutely no character or variation. 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.

I think that in principle this test could produce interesting and useful results. Having researched in the field of computational aesthetics, I speak with some experience. Much of the aesthetic value an artwork 'lives' in such abstracts as its 2D geometry, its 3D geometry, its color contrast etc. I would have preferred that this test be designed to test just one of these attributes. However, even on the currently sma…

I don't want to be too harsh, but in my view this is mostly tosh. For example:

> '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.

Re: Art Vote

#16

Post by halgir »

frereubu wrote: post #11

I studied photography and sculpture, and initially the only thing that made any difference to whether I enjoyed a piece of art was interpretation by someone who's seen a lot of art. There were only two or three people who could do this effectively for me. Eventually, after talking to them a lot and seeing a lot of art, and thinking about it deeply, you start to develop your own tastes, and realise what kinds of thing…

Of course art is much more than randomly generated aesthetics, but I still think this project can be insightful, if not useful. Sure, it's not telling us what objectively makes great art, but I don't believe anything can.

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.

Re: Art Vote

#18

Post by Daub »

frereubu wrote: post #15
Daub wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that in principle this test could produce interesting and useful results. Having researched in the field of computational aesthetics, I speak with some experience. Much of the aesthetic value an artwork 'lives' in such abstracts as its 2D geometry, its 3D geometry, its color contrast etc. I would have preferred that this test be designed to test just one of these attributes. However, even on the currently sma…

I don't want to be too harsh, but in my view this is mostly tosh. For example: > '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 r…

Sure... to those counter examples, I could add more: Gwen John's muted pallet, Joseph Albers' same-hue combinations,

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.

Re: Art Vote

#19

Post by mmaunder »

Simplistic. Starts with lowest common denominator (monochrome nothingburger) and progresses from there too slowly.

Re: Art Vote

#20

Post by bloodyplonker22 »

frereubu wrote: post #11

I studied photography and sculpture, and initially the only thing that made any difference to whether I enjoyed a piece of art was interpretation by someone who's seen a lot of art. There were only two or three people who could do this effectively for me. Eventually, after talking to them a lot and seeing a lot of art, and thinking about it deeply, you start to develop your own tastes, and realise what kinds of thing…

It's sorely obvious that the creator of this project was a computer scientist, or someone who thinks in an overly technical manner rather than an artist, who thinks more about emotions and feel.
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