The Art of the Matter: Part I

This particular rant is about art. Of the abstract variety. And I mean the intentionally abstract stuff. Not like my paintings, which are intended to be straightforward but end up as expressionist nightmares.

Anyway, the reason why it came up is, a friend of mine proposed an idea for a piece of software that could, given a particular painting, automatically identify the artist.

Aside: The friend I was talking to is Angshuman Saha. The only man I know who can tell the difference between Monet and Manet. He can actually distinguish between impressionist and post-impressionist stuff like they were chalk and cheese. (To me, they're both just splotchy stuff on canvas. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure I can tell the difference between chalk and cheese.)

Angshu's own artistic ventures are somewhat minimalist bordering on wierd. His most famous work to date is Black straight line on ruled paper No. 32. Then there's Fish in a napthalene ring, and Default risk model, and... you get the idea. I've been thinking about writing a piece on him called Portrait of an Artist as a Middle-Aged Statistician but haven't gotten around to it yet. Someday...

Now, back to automatic artist identification. Seriously, this can be a fairly difficult task. For one thing, great artists may take a while to evolve their own signature style - their early work may have elements of other artists' styles that they tried to emulate back then. For another, it may be easier, sometimes, to try and identify a certain school of art (impressionism, surrealism and whatever else) than a particular artist. Maybe you could look at some very specific things relating to certain artists. For instance, if you see a soft watch, it's either Dali or someone trying to imitate him. If you see a badly drawn anorexic horse, it's M. F. Hussain. And so on and so forth.

Then there's the case where the whole damn canvas makes no sense. If there was only one school of art that did this, then you could use it as a default option if you found no pattern whatsoever. The problem is, there's more than one school. Different forms of chaos, if you will. Then what do you do?

The conversation segued from there to the arbitrariness of art in general.

Consider Marcel Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase, for instance. Yeah, the picture on top. Do you see the nude? Do you see the staircase, for that matter? Heck, do you even know if the painting is hung right side up?

Sometimes, even the experts can't tell. Take Henri Matisse's Le Bateau (see left). Apparently, it was hung upside down for 47 days in the New York Museum of Modern Art and no one noticed. Frankly, what shocks me is that the phrase "no one noticed" is often followed by an exclamation mark when this painting is mentioned.

There's a damn good reason why artists like these don't rule the world. Imagine what it would be like if Duchamp and his band of dadaists took over Playboy magazine. That painting by Marcel Duchamp could be Miss January. Hell, the Matisse painting could be Miss January - what difference does it make?

Or if Dali and assorted surrealists made Superman:

Bystander 1: It's a flying tiger with an elephant coming out of its mouth!
Bystander 2: It's a violin playing goat!
Bystander 1: And don't forget the giraffe with brightly colored machine tools in the bathtub on the side.
Bystander 3: No, it's Gala posing as both Superman and Josef Stalin at the same time, depending on which way you look at it!

This rant about art has been long pending, so I'll probably continue in my next post. Watch this space. (If anyone's actually watching, that is.)