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Art.sy, a Genome Project for the World of Art
- _neil 14y agoThis is a really nice project with a very clean interface for browsing art. I've spent hours browsing different categories and links between related works. Their team has also made great contributions to open source projects.
- hnriot 14y agoI tried it out and some of the connections are dubious to say the least, for example for the photographer Robert Frank the first related artists is Timothy H. O'Sullivan, which has very little in common with Frank. The same was found with many other artist's I am familiar with. I guess it's just starting out and will improve with time, I presume if I were to create an account I would be able to feedback into the system to fix errors. Painting seemed to fair much better in its relationships, possibly because the artists are more cleanly defined.
- sethbannon 14y agoSimply gorgeous site design.
- sbochins 14y agoYea the simplicity is really great. There is a ton of content getting displayed all at once, but it doesn't seem cluttered. You can easily browse all the information and be delighted at the same time.
- emehrkay 14y agoIt looks great, I am just a little confused by it as there doesnt seem to be any real navigational hierarchy. I'll continue playing around because I love the idea of the service
- StefanKarpinski 14y agoRobert Storr's criticism is pretty vacuous. Crying reductionism is so common as a criticism of scientific approaches from people in the humanities as to be almost an absurd cliché by now. Pity that he either couldn't come up with something more interesting to say or that the Times couldn't be bothered to quote him on something more substantive.
- hnriot 14y agoBut how is he wrong?
- StefanKarpinski 14y agoStorr's flippant dismissal of Art.sy's taxonomy as "reductive" isn't even wrong – it's completely irrelevant. It's the same thing as complaining that Pandora's music genome is reductive. Obviously it's reductive. Applying a systematic taxonomy to music or art – or living creatures or languages or anything at all – clearly cannot capture the nuance and fullness of detail of the actual items to which the taxonomy applies (except my best friend's taxonomy of black metal, which I'm pretty sure has a subsubcategory for every song ever). But such systems aren't intended to do that. It's akin to complaining about the Library of Congress classification system because each book's classification doesn't fully specify its content. That's not the point of the system. It's a navigational and organizational aide, not a complete encoding. A real critique would address the site's success as a navigational and organizational aide. I suspect that Storr uses texts full of reproductions of art in his classes. Does he also complain that they are "reductive" because they are imperfect reproductions of the original artworks? I doubt it. I bet he does, however, select the texts that serve the purpose of helping students of art understand the intellectual and artistic landscape better than others. It's completely absurd to complain that a textbook fails to reproduce the experience of seeing an artwork in person. Of course it doesn't. It is, however, helpful to discuss how a text does and doesn't succeed in providing an understanding of the space of art which it covers.
- andreasvc 14y agoWhile I like your comment I do wonder whether it may rest on a misunderstanding of the work 'reductive'. I believe it is being used in the philosophy of science sense wherein reality can be understood in terms of the workings of components. It stands in contrast with holism, for example Quine's semantic holism.
- jamiequint 14y agoI still can't believe that Art.sy was around for over two years before releasing anything. That seems insane, only time will tell.
- carterac 14y agoSimilar to Spotify, it took us a long time to acquire legal rights to the artworks from all our gallery and institutional partners.
- flipside 14y agoMust have also taken some time to get such high profile investors and advisors. Care to share your secret?
- pefavre 14y agoTo be fair, they spent a lot of time, beside the main Genome project, to build and try out interfaces to showcase artworks, which has always suffered a poor UX. It was in closed beta, though, but I had the chance to see their progress on this side and I can tell it is pretty amazing.
- bearpool 14y agoThis company was around for nearly three years before publicly launching. Seems a bit dubious.
- milkshakes 14y agoThat's because you have no idea how much non technical legwork has to go in place to build something. They had to develop personal relations with thousands of finicky galleries, then somehow convince them to try this new thing, digitizing their art. They had all sorts of fusses about the details of just about everything, every step of the way. See how Art.sy tries to prevent image scraping, for example. There's a lot more behind the scenes.
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- septnuits 14y agoI love the attention to detail. It feels super polished, and the simple design goes well in hand with all the art.