All involved in art must know the Art/ist Genome Project

Artsts, gallerists, critics, curators, collectors should know about the Art Genome Project, for different reasons.


It will assist everyone to be more articulate about art, both about one's own. work as well as the work of others, as well as different types of visual art, different periods, subject matter (or 'contents', meidum (techniques) and style and movements.


It thereby provides a common vocabulary -

Part I


What is The Art Genome Project?

The Project has two parts.

Part 1 is a list of all of the possible characteristics/terms you might apply to art.

Think about an art object, say a painting by Andy Warhol. You might say it is a painting, that it is a work of Pop Art, that it is a silkscreen, that it features an image of Marilyn Monroe, that it is very “high contrast,” or even that it emphasizes the flatness of the image.

These characteristics or terms (e.g. Pop Art, flatness, bright colors) are what we call “genes.”

There are currently over 400 genes in what we call “The Art Genome” and they fall into the following categories. (In parentheses are examples of genes in the category.)

Time Period (Pre-Impressionism, Modern, Contemporary)
Medium (Painting, Sculpture, Installation, Video)
Style or Movement (Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Young British Artists)
Contemporary Tendencies (Tendencies occurring in contemporary art but that people might not yet be comfortable calling “movements,” such as Contemporary Gothic or DIY)
Concepts (Color Theory, Institutional Critique, Related to Film)
Content (Portrait, Landscape, The Studio, Cityscape)
Techniques (Monochrome Painting, Multiple Exposure, Sfumato)
Geographical Regions (Where an artist has lived and worked)
Appearance Genes (The look and feel of an object)
Labs (Genes in development; not public)

We also have hundreds of other genes. These capture individual art-historical and artist influences, such as the fact that Jackson Pollock was influenced by (among other things) Mexican Muralism or Thomas Hart Benton.

Where did all of these genes come from?

Hundreds of years of art-historical scholarship that we are the beneficiaries of
Discussions in books, periodicals and on the web surrounding contemporary art
Many Art.sy genome team meetings and debates
Consistent communication with all of our partners, i.e. the galleries, museums, foundations, collections and estates that feature their work on Art.sy.

Part 2 is applying relevant genes to each of the 3,000 artists and 15,000 artworks on Art.sy.

The list of genes applied to artists and artworks we call their “genomes.”

Like the process of coming up with genes, the application of genes to artists and artworks is a group effort, involving the genome team at Art.sy, extensive research, and consistent communication with our partners.

A few clarifications about genomes and genes:

Every artist and artwork has their own genome. Why? To show how different, for example, Warhol’s oeuvre (his collected works) is in comparison to individual works and how greatly individual works can differ from each other.
Genes are not tags — though we have many tags on the site — because tags are binary (something is either tagged “dog” or not). Genes, in contrast, can range from 0-100, thus capturing how strongly a gene applies to a specific artist or artwork. This nuanced connection between works of art is impossible with a simple tagging mechanism.

So this is The Art Genome Project, the source of all the terms and related searches users see on Art.sy. As always, we welcome your questions and comments.

In the coming weeks, look forward to further posts on topics like precedents for The Art Genome Project (such as art-historical taxonomies or thesauri, encyclopedias and dictionaries, image atlases, and Pandora), what appearance genes try to capture, how algorithms relate to The Art Genome Project, and how and why “Most Similar Artworks” was created.

— Matthew Israel, Director of The Art Genome Project

http://theartgenomeproject.tumblr.com/post/23249952747/what-is-the-art-genome-project

-------------------------


Part II
1000+ categories from The Art Genome Project

There are currently over 1000 categories in The Art Genome Project (last year alone we added close to 100 new categories!), our ongoing and evolving study into the characteristics and connections between artworks and artists.

Spanning art historical periods, styles and movements (Edo Art, Impressionism, Pop Art), subject matter (Nostalgia, Gender, City Life), techniques (Found Objects, Etching, Appropriation) and more, The Art Genome Project’s categories attempt to comprehensively capture both conceptual and formal aspects of art, architecture, and design while making connections between artworks and artists across history.

Explore our full list of categories here. Use our list of categories as a browseable resource of art history terms, or explore a category you’ve never come across (Dynamism? Digital as Manual?) and learn more.

https://www.artsy.net/article/theartgenomeproject-from-pre-history-to-glitch-aesthetic-explore-all-4

--------------------

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_Genome_Project
The Art Genome Project
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Art Genome ProjectArt.sylogo 2.tiff
Key people
Carter Cleveland
Sebastian Cwilich
Matthew Israel
Joe Kennedy
Website artsy.net/theartgenomeproject

The Art Genome Project is the search technology behind Artsy.

The Art Genome Project's search technology is the product of an ongoing art-historical study—undertaken by a team of contributors with art-historical backgrounds at Artsy—seeking to define the characteristics which distinguish and connect works of art, architecture, ancient artifacts and design.[1]

Its primary aim is to provide Artsy users dynamic search categories and explain similarities among art and artists. Currently, there are 1000+ “genes” (i.e. attributes of art) in the project’s taxonomy, including art-historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities.[2][3] These genes are the product of Artsy’s team and their engagement with (and feedback from) the museums, galleries, curators, critics and art historians present on Artsy’s platform.

There are two general parts of the project: 1) Conceiving and defining such characteristics, referred to as “genes,” and 2) Applying these genes to artists and artworks—creating “genomes” for both—for the artsy.net [4] site.

Importantly, unlike tags, which are binary, genes are applied with values ranging from 0 to 100.[5][6] The value indicates the degree of relevance of a gene to an artist or work of art. While not seen by users, such gene values account for the strength of a relationship between artists and artworks. It also enables similarity to be expressed in a more nuanced way[7] than it might be with just tags because one can weigh various attributes of an artist or work of art to establish which might be the most or less important. Furthermore, such nuance allows for matching potential collectors with artworks based on their tastes and preferences.[8][9]

Artsy’s “genes” create various opportunities for discovering and learning about the artist and artworks. If users search for an artist, they can see “related” artists and if they search for an artwork, they can see “related” artworks. Genes (with definitions) also appear on their own pages and provide the backbone for Artsy’s Browse page.

The Art Genome Project provides metadata for search (and similarity) results based on the principles of information retrieval (TF/IDF) and presents results in a UX-driven search product.

Matthew Israel, an art historian, is the Director of The Art Genome Project.[10]