Abstract
Several statistical image properties have been associated with large subsets of traditional visual artworks. Here, we investigate some of these properties in three categories of art that differ in artistic claim and prestige: (1) Traditional art of different cultural origin from established museums and art collections (oil paintings and graphic art of Western provenance, Islamic book illustration and Chinese paintings), (2) Bad Art from two museums that collect contemporary artworks of lesser importance (© Museum Of Bad Art [MOBA], Somerville, and Official Bad Art Museum of Art [OBAMA], Seattle), and (3) twentieth century abstract art of Western provenance from two prestigious museums (Tate Gallery and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen). We measured the following four statistical image properties: the fractal dimension (a measure relating to subjective complexity); self-similarity (a measure of how much the sections of an image resemble the image as a whole), 1st-order entropy of edge orientations (a measure of how uniformly different orientations are represented in an image); and 2nd-order entropy of edge orientations (a measure of how independent edge orientations are across an image). As shown previously, traditional artworks of different styles share similar values for these measures. The values for Bad Art and twentieth century abstract art show a considerable overlap with those of traditional art, but we also identified numerous examples of Bad Art and abstract art that deviate from traditional art. By measuring statistical image properties, we quantify such differences in image composition for the first time.
Highlights
In experimental aesthetics, the search for image features that characterize visual artworks has a long tradition
Note that the four datasets of traditional artworks represent a large variety of artistic techniques
As described previously (Redies et al, 2017), we find that, to some extent, artworks of Western, Islamic and Chinese origin share a specific pattern of statistical image properties
Summary
The search for image features that characterize visual artworks has a long tradition. Opposed to this view, more recent accounts of aesthetic experience postulate that artworks are defined by contextual factors, such as the historical and social circumstances of their creation, the intentions of the artist and the mode of presentation (Goodman, 1968; Dickie, 1974; Danto, 1981; Bullot and Reber, 2013; Zeki, 2013). In this view, which has dominated most of the last century, the status of an object as an artwork is determined by its ever-changing cultural context and function in society
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