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Machine Vision Reveals Previously Unknown Influences Between Great Artists
KentuckyFC writes Art experts look for influences between great masters by studying the artist's use of space, texture, form, shape, colour and so on. They may also consider the subject matter, brushstrokes, meaning, historical context and myriad other factors. So it's easy to imagine that today's primitive machine vision techniques have little to add. Not so. Using a new technique for classifying objects in images, a team of computer scientists and art experts have compared more than 1700 paintings from over 60 artists dating from the early 15th century to the late 20 the century. They've developed an algorithm that has used these classifications to find many well known influences between artists, such as the well known influence of Pablo Picasso and George Braque on the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, the influence of the French romantic Delacroix on the French impressionist Bazille, the Norwegian painter Munch's influence on the German painter Beckmann and Degas' influence on Caillebotte. But the algorithm also discovered connections that art historians have never noticed (judge the comparisons for yourself). In particular, the algorithm points out that Norman Rockwell's Shuffleton's Barber Shop painted in 1950 is remarkably similar to Frederic Bazille's Studio 9 Rue de la Condamine painted 80 years before.
How long until dead artists' heirs latch onto techniques like this to prove "substantial similarity" as part of a copyright suit to try to squeeze money out of working artists?
What the computer can do is point out what is similar. Whether the similarity is an example of influence then needs to be established with further evidence.
I looked at the Rockwell/Bazille comparison, and they don't really seem all that similar - they have three similar elements (stove, chair, and window) but those seem coincidental more than anything. The window in Rockwell's piece, for instance, is small and rectangular while the one in Bazille's is huge and arched. The chair in the Rockwell piece is actually barely identifiable as a chair at first glance, whereas the one in the Bazille piece is immediately recognizable as a wooden chair. They're also three objects that are likely to be close to one another. For instance, my aunt heats with wood and has a stove roughly the same distance from a window as in the Rockwell and Bazille pictures, and if I remember right even has a wooden chair in the same room. I think all this proves is that people tend to put their stoves in rooms with windows and chairs.
Interestingly when M.C. Escher paintings were analyzed it kept returning "divide by zero errors". Upon further examination, it was discovered that it was claiming "divide by the letter "O" errors" and not the number zero.
Pretty much. I suspect this is one of those situations where "correlation != causality" is an appropriate comment.
I would say instead that, given a sufficiently large enough data set, patterns and correlations are bound to appear. The likelihood that thousands of paintings were analyzed in this way and no matches were found, purely on a random basis, is very small.