Pandora: Description of a Painting Database for Art Movement Recognition with Baselines and Perspectives

To facilitate computer analysis of visual art, in the form of paintings, we introduce Pandora (Paintings Dataset for Recognizing the Art movement) database, a collection of digitized paintings labelled with respect to the artistic movement. Noting that the set of databases available as benchmarks for evaluation is highly reduced and most existing ones are limited in variability and number of images, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The database consists of more than 7700 images from 12 art movements. Each genre is illustrated by a number of images varying from 250 to nearly 1000. We investigate how local and global features and classification systems are able to recognize the art movement. Our experimental results suggest that accurate recognition is achievable by a combination of various categories.To facilitate computer analysis of visual art, in the form of paintings, we introduce Pandora (Paintings Dataset for Recognizing the Art movement) database, a collection of digitized paintings labelled with respect to the artistic movement. Noting that the set of databases available as benchmarks for evaluation is highly reduced and most existing ones are limited in variability and number of images, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The database consists of more than 7700 images from 12 art movements. Each genre is illustrated by a number of images varying from 250 to nearly 1000. We investigate how local and global features and classification systems are able to recognize the art movement. Our experimental results suggest that accurate recognition is achievable by a combination of various categories.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, 6 table

Make Love, Not War?: The Role of the Chorus in Kokoschka’s “Murderer Hope of Women”

In the summer of 1909, two one-acts by the twenty-three-year-old painter Oskar Kokoschka premiered in Vienna in an outdoor theatre built in the garden adjacent to the art museum as part of the second Kunstschau exhibit. The two Kunstschauen (of 1908 and 1909) were organized by Gustav Klimt and his friends in order “to expose the Viennese public to the most shocking and revolutionary forces in contemporary art,” and Kokoschka exhibited in both. The showing of Oskar Kokoschka’s art and his plays cemented his reputation as the most prominent enfant terrible of his day. These exhibitions helped ensure that, by the time he moved to Berlin in 1910, his works would become some of the key contributions to the seminal expressionist journal Der Sturm, gaining Kokoschka a place in the canon of European expressionism

Contextualizing abstraction and abstract expressionist art in Malaysia

Abstract Expressionism has been one of the Western art movements that has influenced Malaysian artists. Since late 1950s and even until today, abstraction and works that falls into the formalistic approach of Abstract Expressionist have been well accepted and produced and this is more so since the promulgation of the National Cultural Policy in 1971 and the Islamization Policy in the late 1970s. This paper discusses abstraction and Abstract Expressionism and their acceptance, adaptation, and transformation under local conditions and situations. This could be observed as abstraction and Abstract Expressionism were used as a stylistic approach or an artistic method to highlight local subject matter and personal experiences by Malaysian artists through works that render local landscapes and nature, themes and religion and/or cultural references such as Jawi script, myths and mythologies and the abstraction of figuration. This paper will also discuss how works that seem to be rooted in formalistic exploration flourished aligned to this condition. Within this framework, this paper will discuss several works that have been recognized and discussed as abstract and Abstract Expressionist works produced by Malaysian artists

Inadvertent - Ars accidentalis

Even though art is the product of an intentional act of fabrication, the serendipitous spill of an ink or paint, the unforeseen slip of a pen or brush, sudden shake of a camera in the analog realm have the potential of generating an unconscious lead in the planned course of action. The consequential shift in direction may completely change the aesthetics and content of an artwork. An artist should always be open to such 'accidental' dimension which will help him / her to take the original idea out of its initial framework and recontextualize it for a new conception. The outcomes of software ‘failures’ in digital technology made a similar type of aesthetics emerge: Glitch aesthetics. The ‘dirty’ and sometimes ‘chaotic’ nature of glitches made things look much more organic and human, as opposed to mechanically computerized. This unrefined aesthetics has recently become so popular among designers that some of them have made specific websites as tributes to the process. Despite the fact that the accidental dimension in art looks more compatible with analog practices, there are various instances it finds its niche in the digital world as well. Mystifying benefits like freedom from preconceptions, momentary skepticism about planned course of action, avoiding mechanical thinking / prejudices, reaching a more natural / authentic result, discovering unusual and unique aesthetical domains, etc. will always make 'ars accidentalis' an indispensable part of art practice

The Monetary Appreciation of Paintings: From Realism to Magritte

This study investigates how investments in painted arts compare to those in stocks in terms of risk return trade off using Sharpe and Treynor ratios and Markowitz efficient frontiers. A large database was analysed consisting of more than 10500 auction prices of Belgian painted art over the period 1970-1997. Hedonic art returns are influenced by auction location and auction house, current of art, painters’ reputation, medium, signature and painting size. Surrealism and luminism were the most popular currents of art (in monetary terms), while expressionism and symbolism gained (financial) esteem. This study concludes that art investments underperform equity market investments due to high riskiness, transaction costs, capital gains, resale rights, and insurance premia. In addition, the Markowitz efficient frontier shows limited diversification potential for art.Investing in art;Hedonic regression

Buying Beauty: On Prices and Returns in the Art Market

This paper investigates the evolution of prices and returns in the art market since the middle of the previous century. We first compile a comprehensive list of more than 10,000 artists and then build a dataset that contains information on more than 1.1 million auction sales of paintings, prints, and works on paper. We perform an extensive hedonic regression analysis that includes unique price-determining variables capturing amongst others: the artist’s reputation, the strength of the attribution to an artist, and the subject matter of the work. Based on the resulting price index, we conclude that art has appreciated in value by a moderate 4.03% per year, in real USD terms, between 1951 and 2007. During the art market boom period 2002-2007, prices augmented by 11.60% annually, which explains the increased attention to ‘art as an investment’. Furthermore, our results show that, over the last quarter of a century, prices of oil paintings and of post-war art have risen faster than the overall market. In contrast to earlier studies, we find evidence of a positive masterpiece effect: high-quality art makes a better investment. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications, and do not seem influenced by sample selection or survivorship biases. When comparing the long-term returns on art to those on financial assets, we find that art has underperformed stocks but outperformed bonds. However, between 1982 and 2007, bonds yielded higher average returns (at a lower risk) than art. Buyers of art should thus expect to reap non-pecuniary benefits rather than high financial returns, especially because the modest art returns are further diminished by substantial transaction costs.Art investments;Art market;Art returns;Auction prices;Hedonic regressions;Longterm stock returns;Long-term bond returns;Masterpiece effect

Memory of Water Scenic Design-- Reinventing Memories on Stage

My paper describes my process of designing the set for the UNH Theatre and Dance Department production The Memory of Water. Linking dream and reality together, the set design of the show is my attempt and process of putting the non-realistic elements into a more tangible form-- reinventing the memories on the stage