Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Research

ICYMI: Art Is Better Than…

Sex, food, drugs, art–are they all the same? Do they provide the same kind of pleasure and engagement?

No, says Julia F. Christensen, a neuroscientist at the Warburg Institute, University of London. She says–and I seriously hope she is correct–that art engages the brain in a special way that can “help overwrite the detrimental effects of dysfunctional urges and craving.” In an opinion piece published by the Royal Societyy last year, “Pleasure Junkies All Around: Why It Matters and Why ‘the Arts’ Might Be the Answer,” she apparently wrote that, according to the abstract,

We expect to obtain pleasurable experiences fast and easily. We are used to hyper-palatable foods and drinks, and we can get pornography, games and gadgets whenever we want them. The problem: with this type of pleasure-maximizing choice behaviour we may be turning ourselves into mindless pleasure junkies, handing over our free will for the next dopamine shoot….

In excess, however, such activities might have negative effects on our biopsychological health: they provoke a change in the neural mechanisms underlying choice behaviour. Choice behaviour becomes biased towards short-term pleasure-maximizing goals, just as in the addicted brain…

…it is proposed that engagement with the arts might be an activity with the potential to foster healthy choice behaviour—and not be just for pleasure. The evidence in this rather new field of research is still piecemeal and inconclusive. This review aims to motivate targeted research in this domain.

Well, that set off an argument, as I learned in yesterday’s New York Times. Its article, headlined online as Why Scientists Are Battling Over Pleasure. (which was a heck of a lot better than the print hed, Mona Lisa and Pornhub as Equals?  Where is taste when you need it?), doesn’t really take sides but gives the last word to sex–quoting a sex expert as saying that some foods are orgasmic.

Back to art, I side with Christensen in one respect–she advocates more study about the pleasures of art.

The Times article, and presumably her paper, cited three core elements that all sides could back–and these, too, are very interesting:

â–  As with wine, how much people enjoy art seems to be affected by contextual cues like price or the reputation of the creator.

â–  Art is difficult but possible to define. (Definitions vary, however.)

â–  Across cultures, what people perceive as beautiful is less consistent with artwork than it is with architecture, landscapes and faces. (Faces are the most consistent.)

Neuroaesthetics is in its infancy–why close off further research? Or why even dispute an early, very qualified (in the limited sense), tentative conclusion?

 

Artificial Intelligence Invades The Museum and Art Worlds

“It’s a massively ambitious project.” That is Tony Guillan, a multimedia producer for the Tate museum, in the U.K, speaking. Guillan manages the IK PRize, which the Tate Britain has awarded for the last few years to projects that use digital technology in an innovative way to promote the exploration of art at the Tate Britain or on the Tate website.

He’s speaking of this year’s winner, called Recognition. Have a look–it may not look like that much, but it uses artificial intelligence, and A.I. is just starting to be used in the art world.

I write about this in The New York Times this weekend, in an article headlined Artificial Intelligence As a Bridge Between Art and Reality, and I invite you to read the details there. It’s a little gimmicky, you’ll see, but I think it is the best winner so far.

But here’s how I describe the winner in my article:

It features a program that continuously screens about 1,000 news photographs a day, supplied by Reuters, and tries to match them with 30,000 British artworks in the Tate’s database, based on similarities in faces, objects, theme and composition….

…People can watch the “Recognition” process online: Images in the database rotate past a photo and are given scores, according to the four variables. When a match is made, the pairing is saved in an online gallery and displayed at Tate Britain. Since it began Sept. 2, the program has been twinning images at a rate of one to three an hour. By the time it ends on Nov. 27, “we expect 2,000 to 3,000 matches,” Mr. Guillan said.

A sample, which shows eunuchs applying make-up before Raksha Bandhan festival celebrations in a red light area in Mumbai, India, 17 August 2016, matched with Sir Peter Lely’s Two Ladies of the Lake Family c.1660, Tate is below:

ik_prize_match_1

The website is a little confusing at first, but give it a try and you’ll figure it out. And you can’t figure out the puzzling matches, you can go one layer deeper in the website for an explanation. Matches may still seem strange, but Guillan told me, “When you work with AI, it’s unpredictable by nature. The exciting thing is that you are creating something that works autonomously.”

thenextrembrandt-ledeI asked Guillan if, beneath this project, the project was suggesting that photographers are influenced, perhaps unconsciously, by art that they have seen, or that there is a universal or common conception of what makes a good picture? He said, “not specifically, no.” But, as we spoke, we agreed that the project raises the question about representation. “When we look at a painting,” he said. “we’re aware that it’s a construction; it has a point of view. But when we look at a news photograph, we treat it as a mimetic, a false reality. We don’t think about it as being a construct, but it is.”

Microsoft was a sponsor of the prize this year, and will be again. For it, according to Eric Horvitz, director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, WA., “It’s a great way for Microsoft to communicate that we’re democratizing AI.” So stay tuned for other A.I. tool coming from Microsoft.

There are other A.I. projects in the arts. “The Next Rembrandt” is one. It asks, “Can the great Master be brought back to life to create one more painting?” I found that website confusing too. But here’s a link to a YouTube video on the project. It explains how the project uses data to forecast the next painting Rembrandt would have made. It’s at right here.

I find it a little scary. And as for fakes, well…that could be an issue down the road.

 

 

 

The Arts: By The (National) Numbers

A few years ago, when the National Endowment for the Arts said it would join with the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to determine how much the arts contributed to the economy, I applauded. When the very first data was released, I even tried to sell an article to about the beginning of this worthwhile effort. The editor I pitched passed, saying that we should wait until the data was more meaningful and more revealing.

How right he was. I still welcome the NEA’s initiative, but the release of a report today shows that this task will be harder than we perhaps thought. What we have now is not, to my eyes, very revealing about museums, operas, jazz venues, etc. The data are too encompassing.

Look at the headline numbers, quoted from the NEA release:

In 2013, arts and cultural production contributed $704.2 billion to the U.S. economy, a 32.5 percent increase since 1998, and 4.23 percent of total GDP…. more than some other sectors, such as construction ($619B) and utilities ($270B).

The annual growth rate for arts and culture as a whole (1.8 percent) was on par with that of the total U.S. economy (1.9 percent). But it grew faster than other sectors such as accommodation and food services (1.4 percent), retail trade (1.3 percent), and transportation and warehousing (1.1 percent).

Another key finding is that consumer spending on the performing arts grew 10 percent annually over the 15-year period.

The production of performing arts services has grown at a faster clip than arts and cultural production in general, contributing $44.5 billion to the U.S. economy in 2013.

In 2013, arts and cultural sector employed 4.7 million wage and salary workers, earning $339 billion. Industries employing the largest number of ACPSA workers include government (including school-based arts education), retail trade, broadcasting, motion picture industries, and publishing.

The industry with the fastest growth in arts and culture production between 1998 and 2013 was “other information services,” a category that includes online publishing, broadcasting, and streaming services (12.3 percent). Other fast-growing industries were sound recording (9.5 percent), arts-related computer systems design (including services for films and sound recordings) (7.7 percent), and regular broadcasting (5 percent).

You can see already one of the key problems. The numbers do not separate profit-making arts businesses from non-profit cultural institutions. Therefore, in that wonderful $44.5 billion contributed to the economy by performing arts services, what is (non-profit) opera? What is jazz? Are they shrinking while performances of “Tony and Tina’s Wedding” and “Menopause; The Musical” toured to more cities?

That consumer spending number also asks more questions than it answers: does it mean that more people went to performing arts productions, that prices were raised faster than other consumer spending, or both? Or something different?

Also, what would happen to these aggregate numbers if you subtract the motion picture business, television, “craft arts” (meaning production of jewelry, china, silverware and custom architectural woodwork), fashion, manufacture of musical instruments, etc.?  They are all part of these accounts. The definitions are overly broad. (Witness this chart.)

ADP9--fast-growing-industries%20

The employment numbers include tattoo artists, TV broadcasters, newspaper photographers, business agents and camera repairmen as well as fine artists of all disciplines, btw.

I won’t go on. I’m glad the NEA/BEA are trying this, but for now it’s not much use to what RCA readers would consider the arts unless it continues to be refined. And I would ward off any use of the cultural sector being bigger than the construction sector without a definition in terms–to cite one example. The cultural sector, after all, gains nothing if its facts are not credible.

Chart Courtesy of the NEA

What’s Up With The Met’s Lauder Center?

Rabinow-Rebecca-webThat was the question on my mind when I proposed a story on it for the annual New York Times special section on museums, which was part of today’s paper. The result is headlined A Gift That Could Rewrite Art History in the paper (it’s different–and too “newsy” a headline on the web–bt that’s journalism today. Interestingly, the Times usually shows the writer the print head, but not the web head).

In any case, here’s the link to the article.

The Lauder Research Center for Modern Art has an enviable $22 million endowment of its own and is headed by curator Rebecca Rabinow (pictured). I won’t go into the details of the center’s components here–they are all in the article. The most interesting thing for RCA readers will be to watch for results. One project in particular, in which a scholar named Verane Tasseau is trying to compile the inventory of Daniel Kahnweiler’s gallery and trace where those artworks went, has great potential to fulfill that headline.

In the meantime, you may want to peruse the Center’s microsite, which contains a lot of information and databases that are growing by the week.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met

 

NEA Reveals The Real Targets For Art Museums

The National Endowment for the Arts released three reports today on arts participation, barriers to it, the impact of the arts and culture industries on the economy–all information from 2012. There’s much to digest. Here’s the link to them.

FigTGEBut I’m going to paste here just four charts from them that speak to one aspect of the environment for arts museums. Each one tracks interest in going to an art exhibit by people who had not been to an art museum in the last 12 months. They were asked:

During the last 12 months, was there a performance or exhibit that you wanted to go to, but did not?

Chart No. 1: As you can see, about 5 percent of both females and (a little less) males said they had been interested in going to see an art show. That’s it.

FigTAEChart No. 2: When you cut the data by age, younger people–aged 19 to 29 and aged 30 to 44–are much less interested in going to art exhibits than are older people. The 45 to 59 age group is the only one exceeding 5 percent–and just by a percent at most.

Chart No. 3: The race/ethnicity data is also no surprise, really. Non-Hispanic whites are at 5 percent; African-Americans/Hispanic are a little below that, and Other is a little above that. I’m guessing–but based on my knowledge of similar previous surveys, the most interested “other” are Asians, who have had higher arts participation rates in the past.

FigTREWhat do all of these charts say? That, across the whole population, interest in attending art exhibits is low.

I think it also means that museums that are programming for the masses–the 95 percent of those not already going–are making a mistake. They just aren’t that interested in art, and it’s doubtful that they will be drawn in huge numbers to art museums, no matter what gimmick a museum tries.

Instead, museums should focus on that 5 percent of the population, what the NEA survey called “interested non-attendees.”

Why aren’t these people going to art museums, even once a year? See the last chart.

FigT1EAccording to the NEA survey, the biggest factor was–wait for it–no time. More than 50 percent say they’ve got too much to do or too much work, outside the museum-going. The next reason was “too difficult to get there.” Again, based on past knowledge of other surveys, this is the “there’s nowhere to park” response. Museums outside big cities have to figure out the parking problems.

Only then came cost–it looks like about 28 percent. To me, this means seeking more underwriting from donors for free days or evenings. I am regularly told by museum directors (and others) that trustees push for big attendance numbers for special shows. Fine, then development directors should priorities asking them to help offer free admission–or reduced admission–at certain times.

Finally, the last big reason is that the interested non-attendees have no one to go with. Sure, it is more fun for most people to view art with someone(s). And in some cities doing anything alone is not comfortable for most people. Museums should attempt to change that, to emphasize occasionally that museums are wonderful experiences for someone on their own.

It is true that the vast majority of people go to museums with someone. Art museums are social spaces. At MoMA, Glenn Lowry told me not too long ago, the number is 85 percent–if memory serves. But they’re not just social spaces. What about luring the other 15 percent, not with singles nights, but just a little attention to the experience for someone on his or her own?

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the NEA