What’s art?
Concept, Design, Development
Have you ever seen a work of art in a museum or gallery and wondered it got there? Or thought, “I could make something better than that”? Not all art looks, behaves, or engages in the same way. Coming up with a consistent definition of art, or criteria for its evaluation, is challenging because art is so broad and serves so any functions. It works across media, cultures, time, and purposes. Often, context helps us understand art but we also can’t help having that gut reaction.
Special thanks to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for making their collection data available through the Open Access API, helping make this shared exploration possible.
Why build this?
Frankly, this is a provocation. If you want to debate the validity of this project, I’ll consider it a success. I’d love to see more debate and dialogue between museums and their visitors. That’s healthy. That’s dynamic. And navigating differences to find commonalities is, I believe, a key component of communities.
Goals
To establish vocabulary for the evaluation of art that artists and non-artists could understand. It’s likely the wrong criteria to someone. Maybe you. That’s okay, and I hope it inspires you to consider what criteria matter to you.
To create a tool that museum staff could use to better understand how the public views their collection.
To facilitate discussion about the evaluation of art between museum visitors, give educators a tool for the discussion of art and design principles.
Evaluation Criteria
The evaluation criteria was a hybrid of A) the language used in classrooms to teach the general principles of art and B) the framework for the evaluation of art in auctions.
Story: Does this artwork convey a narrative, share a moment, or describe a scene you can imagine happening?
Originality: Consider the time and place this was created. Does this artwork feel innovative, surprising, or different from what you usually see?
Historical Context: Does this artwork help you picture when, where, or how people lived?
Visual Impact: How strong or engaging are the visual elements like color, composition, and detail?
Purpose: Does this artwork seem to have a function or express a message, belief, or deeper idea?
Overall Impression: How much did this artwork resonate with you or stay in your mind? Did it affect you? Make you feel something?
Initital Prototype
Three works of art from the Met’s collection, ranked via survey by 30 respondents. A proof-of-concept test of a larger idea in which users rank art on a live website and this data is collected and visualized.
EARLY Sketches
This project began as a color analysis but that idea seemed a little too shallow so I began thinking of other qualities I could measure. Which led me to the idea that the data didn’t need to come from the artwork, rather it could come from the viewer.