-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 03/09/14 11:24 AM, Joel Weishaus wrote: > Rob; > > Is there a link to this story?
- From my "Links" the other day: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/902625-computers-can-find-similarities-between-paintings-but-art-history-is-about-so-much-more/ The article starts out as a valid if obvious criticism of a Digital Humanities project that finds visual similarities between scanned images of paintings. The project demonstrates a useful defamiliarization and investigation technique, but obviously isn't without limitations. Visual similarities may not always be caused by direct *influence* between works in a small database. There may be a third common ancestor external to the database or there may be cultural or physical influences or constraints at play for example. The article then goes off the deep end a bit by framing the digital humanities project as a "connoisseurial" approach to art that fails to follow the political programme of current academic art history, thereby defending the evils of "the canon" and "the art market". In contrast to connoisseurial approaches, current academic art history isn't about *looking* at art. It's about giving voice to what has historically been excluded from the canon, the market, and art history itself. But valorizing works that were previously excluded from the canon and the market will make them more appealing for inclusion in the canon and the market... There's less difference and more opportunity here than might appear. Both digital art history and current academic art history are gnostic ideologies, ways of not seeing. The former uses machine vision, the latter the canons of critical theory. If academic art history really wants to move beyond the canon and the market, rather than expand or merely recenter them, it needs to deal in *populations* of works. This is something that digital humanities approaches can do. I believe that the political programme of the former has more to gain from the technical programme of the latter than vice versa. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJUCPTgAAoJECciMUAZd2dZi08H/07+QY82Ge3KZOM55TZUGoTt omKkXK9aNPYGqMJGuBMYuAIbb/np6XgVfWY374Q02eweSLuoz+XC190n8TRmolJA vlGQLyGa+V32sTLh36cmxUwM7/FsPURPzeyaADaMPTjJRxLTclvgnL6WZ6zR0xnk aqTIRto+ItOouJ5FFbjhuNU00ocuWwTKkLlWQvV/MRJW78Zm3Q2jNFsM6J0mpSuS mEeQ+uLI/hgd+pn2mYsIrR1VET74G3UGE+Ja6kYUSrbiDRyOMJiFW4m+rrLAtkKi jMxFP44j3msMolkv67wsjhEgVDIPCKk9GAuauAQBuoNRSVFSZ0O57mmMFWQzuMg= =g49B -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
