Art.sy, a Genome Project for the World of Art

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/arts/design/artsy-is-mapping-the-world-of-art-on-the-web.html

by mixonic • 14 years ago

86 26 14 years ago

_neil• 14 years ago

This is a really nice project with a very clean interface for browsing art. I've spent hours browsing different categories and links between related works. Their team has also made great contributions to open source projects.

hnriot2• 14 years ago

I tried it out and some of the connections are dubious to say the least, for example for the photographer Robert Frank the first related artists is Timothy H. O'Sullivan, which has very little in common with Frank. The same was found with many other artist's I am familiar with. I guess it's just starting out and will improve with time, I presume if I were to create an account I would be able to feedback into the system to fix errors.

Painting seemed to fair much better in its relationships, possibly because the artists are more cleanly defined.

sethbannon• 14 years ago

Simply gorgeous site design.

sbochins• 14 years ago

Yea the simplicity is really great. There is a ton of content getting displayed all at once, but it doesn't seem cluttered. You can easily browse all the information and be delighted at the same time.

emehrkay• 14 years ago

It looks great, I am just a little confused by it as there doesnt seem to be any real navigational hierarchy. I'll continue playing around because I love the idea of the service

StefanKarpinski2• 14 years ago

Robert Storr's criticism is pretty vacuous. Crying reductionism is so common as a criticism of scientific approaches from people in the humanities as to be almost an absurd cliché by now. Pity that he either couldn't come up with something more interesting to say or that the Times couldn't be bothered to quote him on something more substantive.

hnriot2• 14 years ago

But how is he wrong?

StefanKarpinski2• 14 years ago

Storr's flippant dismissal of Art.sy's taxonomy as "reductive" isn't even wrong – it's completely irrelevant. It's the same thing as complaining that Pandora's music genome is reductive. Obviously it's reductive. Applying a systematic taxonomy to music or art – or living creatures or languages or anything at all – clearly cannot capture the nuance and fullness of detail of the actual items to which the taxonomy applies (except my best friend's taxonomy of black metal, which I'm pretty sure has a subsubcategory for every song ever). But such systems aren't intended to do that. It's akin to complaining about the Library of Congress classification system because each book's classification doesn't fully specify its content. That's not the point of the system. It's a navigational and organizational aide, not a complete encoding.

A real critique would address the site's success as a navigational and organizational aide. I suspect that Storr uses texts full of reproductions of art in his classes. Does he also complain that they are "reductive" because they are imperfect reproductions of the original artworks? I doubt it. I bet he does, however, select the texts that serve the purpose of helping students of art understand the intellectual and artistic landscape better than others. It's completely absurd to complain that a textbook fails to reproduce the experience of seeing an artwork in person. Of course it doesn't. It is, however, helpful to discuss how a text does and doesn't succeed in providing an understanding of the space of art which it covers.

FreakLegion3• 14 years ago

The classification of works of art is a far cry from, say, taxonomy in biology. I'd submit that there's nothing really scientific about it. But even if there were, let me just quote David Perkins summarizing Benedetto Croce (on literature, but the point is transferable):

The individual quality or difference of a work of art is the special locus of its value. Since taxonomies are based on features texts share, they foreground what is least interesting about them.

andreasvc5• 14 years ago

That's rather a lot of assumptions packed into a seemingly logical conclusion.

I think it's perfectly possible for a text to be appreciated because of the way it executes a specific topic or genre, such that its quality is not something individual or different.

Secondly I can imagine taxonomies which are not based on shared textual features, but on chronological, geographical, and genre features.

Thirdly, I don't see why a shared feature would automatically be the "least interesting". What's interesting is rather subjective and context-dependent. If for example I had a particular interest in literature coming out of the first world war, this shared feature could be at the top of my list.

streptomycin• 14 years ago

Taxonomy in biology isn't an exact science, either. For instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem

_delirium• 14 years ago

As someone from the scientific side, I would say it's often at least somewhat accurate, and scientists really do frequently take embarrassingly reductive approaches when trying to dip their toes into digital-humanities work, without having read enough of the relevant background material. It's cliche as a criticism, sure. So is the accusation that a lot of humanities/theory work is too "fuzzy". But both criticisms are perceived as cliche precisely because the errors they point out are so common.

andreasvc5• 14 years ago

Perhaps both arguments are true, but not a problem. If reduction gives results, then it's useful; similarly for being fuzzy.

snowmaker• 14 years ago

Given that the NYT was giving so much air time to a new company, they probably felt obligated to print a critical point of view as well in order to seem "balanced".

jamiequint• 14 years ago

I still can't believe that Art.sy was around for over two years before releasing anything. That seems insane, only time will tell.

carterac• 14 years ago

Similar to Spotify, it took us a long time to acquire legal rights to the artworks from all our gallery and institutional partners.

flipside• 14 years ago

Must have also taken some time to get such high profile investors and advisors. Care to share your secret?

pefavre• 14 years ago

To be fair, they spent a lot of time, beside the main Genome project, to build and try out interfaces to showcase artworks, which has always suffered a poor UX. It was in closed beta, though, but I had the chance to see their progress on this side and I can tell it is pretty amazing.

bearpool• 14 years ago

This company was around for nearly three years before publicly launching. Seems a bit dubious.

milkshakes• 14 years ago

That's because you have no idea how much non technical legwork has to go in place to build something. They had to develop personal relations with thousands of finicky galleries, then somehow convince them to try this new thing, digitizing their art. They had all sorts of fusses about the details of just about everything, every step of the way. See how Art.sy tries to prevent image scraping, for example. There's a lot more behind the scenes.

septnuits• 14 years ago

I love the attention to detail. It feels super polished, and the simple design goes well in hand with all the art.

Art.sy, a Genome Project for the World of Art

Related Stories