Art.sy, a Genome Project for the World of Art

[StefanKarpinski]

Robert 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.

[_delirium]

As someone from the scientific side, I would say it's often at least somewhat accurate, and scientists really do frequently take embarrassingly reductive approaches when trying to dip their toes into digital-humanities work, without having read enough of the relevant background material. It's cliche as a criticism, sure. So is the accusation that a lot of humanities/theory work is too "fuzzy". But both criticisms are perceived as cliche precisely because the errors they point out are so common.

[FreakLegion]

The classification of works of art is a far cry from, say, taxonomy in biology. I'd submit that there's nothing really scientific about it. But even if there were, let me just quote David Perkins summarizing Benedetto Croce (on literature, but the point is transferable):

The individual quality or difference of a work of art is the special locus of its value. Since taxonomies are based on features texts share, they foreground what is least interesting about them.

[snowmaker]

Given that the NYT was giving so much air time to a new company, they probably felt obligated to print a critical point of view as well in order to seem "balanced".

[hnriot]

But how is he wrong?

[jamiequint]

I still can't believe that Art.sy was around for over two years before releasing anything. That seems insane, only time will tell.

[carterac]

Similar to Spotify, it took us a long time to acquire legal rights to the artworks from all our gallery and institutional partners.

[pefavre]

To 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.

[_neil]

This 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]

I 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]

Simply gorgeous site design.

[sbochins]

Yea 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]

It 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

[septnuits]

I love the attention to detail. It feels super polished, and the simple design goes well in hand with all the art.

[bearpool]

This company was around for nearly three years before publicly launching. Seems a bit dubious.

[milkshakes]

That'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.