Demographic influences on contemporary art with unsupervised style embeddings

Abstract

Computational art analysis has, through its reliance on classification tasks, prioritised historical datasets in which the artworks are already well sorted with the necessary annotations. Art produced today, on the other hand, is numerous and easily accessible, through the internet and social networks that are used by professional and amateur artists alike to display their work. Although this art—yet unsorted in terms of style and genre—is less suited for supervised analysis, the data sources come with novel information that may help frame the visual content in equally novel ways. As a first step in this direction, we present contempArt, a multi-modal dataset of exclusively contemporary artworks. contempArt is a collection of paintings and drawings, a detailed graph network based on social connections on Instagram and additional socio-demographic information; all attached to 442 artists at the beginning of their career. We evaluate three methods suited for generating unsupervised style embeddings of images and correlate them with the remaining data. We find no connections between visual style on the one hand and social proximity, gender, and nationality on the other.

Publication
Proceedings - European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops
Noa Garcia
Noa Garcia
Specially-Appointed Assistant Professor

Her research interests lie in computer vision and machine learning applied to visual retrieval and joint models of vision and language for high-level understanding tasks.

Yuta Nakashima
Yuta Nakashima
Associate Professor

Yuta Nakashima is an associate professor with Institute for Datability Science, Osaka University. His research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition, natural langauge processing, and their applications.