Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Technology

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?

 

What Can Augmented Reality Do For Museums?

I tend to me a bit skeptical about the use of technology in museums. But on a recent visit to Denver, I stopped in at the Clyfford Still Museum to see Still & Art, which puts augmented reality to an interesting use.

The Still has an issue in that it is a single-artist museum that cannot display the work of other artists. That’s what Still himself wanted. He also famouslt declared “My work is not influenced by anybody.” But he clearly was, as Still & Art shows. The museum sidesteps the issue a little by saying that:

While many observers have regarded this view as merely typical of the artist’s notoriously unyielding singularity, in hindsight Still’s words ring true at a deeper level. The concept of “influence” suggests external forces acting upon a passive mind. Still’s vision, however, was intensely active. His deep knowledge of world art history enabled him to “take and break” a wealth of images and ideas ranging from the distant to the recent past. Still & Art illustrates how he channeled these points of reference into his own intensely personal style.

I’m not really buying that line, but I found the use of augmented reality to be appropriate here, if not always successful. The iPads passed out to to visitors are a little balky unless you hold them as if you are filming the exhibition–which is a little clumsy.

The exhibition includes more than 80 Still paintings, works on paper, photographs, and sculptures, and along with them it presents images of other artists. Some are simply printed reproductions, but some appear on an empty gallery wall “by way of a handheld device that presents the Museum’s first augmented-reality experience—in striking juxtaposition with Still’s.”

Still’s engagement with artists, as shown here, runs from Leonardo through his contemporaries.

Above, I’ve inserted two pictures of what the augmented reality shows–the one at the top, juxtaposing Still with de Kooning, is the best example.

Below, I’ve pasted shots of what the more traditional presentation–with reproduced photos of Van Gogh, O’Keeffe and Monet–is like.

Neither, in all truth, are completely satisfying. But augmented reality is still in its infancy at museums. Let’s see how things develop. If they do.

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.

 

 

 

Whitney’s New Collection Database: The Good And The Requested

In the runup to its move downtown this spring (to the building at right), the Whitney Museum just announced an expanded online database of its permanent collection. It’s grown from 700 works of art to more than 21,000 by some 3,000 artists–“spanning all mediums—painting, sculpture, film, video, photography, Whitneyworks on paper, installation, and new media.”

Along with images of the works, this searchable database also includes written text, resources for teachers, as well as audio and video files, providing a deeper insight into select pieces. The Museum will continually be adding content and new functionality to the site, enriching it with information about current works in the collection and recent acquisitions. Visitors to the site will be able to fully explore the breadth and depth of a collection that helped define what is innovative and influential in American art since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Good move. I’ve explored it a little, and I like certain aspects. E.g., at the top, there’s a link to recent acquisitions. There are links to works with interpretive texts, to works with related video or audio, to works with resources for teachers. It’s easily reachable too–one click on the homepage to “Collections.”

I like that you can search by artist’s name, of course. But I would to search other ways, too. I’d like to search by donor, for example. And by year of acquisition–would it be interesting to see all the works acquired in, say, 1970 versus 2010?

When you put in Edward Hopper, you get 3,154 works–I’d like to know how many paintings, how many drawings, etc. I’d like to know if a work is on view–and where.

Also, you seem to have to get the name rendered just so. When I put in Gertrude Whitney, I got nothing. When I put in Gertrude Vanderbilt–not her full name either–I got results for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. That means her works and works depicting her, like Robert Henri’s.

So there are some glitches to fix and definitely some hoped-for functionality.

But I’m glad that more and more museums are putting their collections online.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Whitney

On The Art Movie Docket: Matisse and…

“Matisse From Tate Modern and MoMA” is the latest of Exhibition on Screen’s movies about art exhibitions to open here in the U.S. It’s a one-night only event on Jan. 13 at theaters nationwide. Fathom Events is the distributor, and you can find out where it is nearest you right here.

The movie is 90 minutes long, and it’s about the cutouts show now at MoMA. You can see the preview on YouTube, which tells the five essential things you matisseshould know about Matisse’s cutouts. Here’s the billing from the email I received for a preview (which I can’t attend, unfortunately):

This “exhibition on screen” provides viewers with a virtual tour of the exhibition with the addition of illuminating archival materials and commentary from Nicholas Serota, Glenn Lowry, curators, conservators, and some who knew the artist in his final years. For those unable to see the show and for those who have and want to know more, the film takes the audience behind the scenes with unprecedented access and into the galleries.

If it it’l like the one of Manet, which I did see, that is a fair description.

This all made me wonder how Exhibitions On Screen was faring–I wrote about Phil Grabsky and his venture in spring 2013 here and for The Wall Street Journal. Well, I guess the answer is good enough, because after Matisse four more such movies will be shown here in 2015. They are “Rembrandt: The Late Works,” “Vincent van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing,” “The Impressionists,” and “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” More details here.

To me, they are supplementary to seeing an exhibit, not a substitute–except when you can’t get to the real thing.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Getty ImagesÂ