Art/Styles and movements - Monoskop
▻https://monoskop.org/Art
Art historians have debated the limits and bias of style analysis and classification for decades.[2] Despite that, the style remains “inseparable from working concepts of art and its history”[3], while its relevance is now being reaffirmed in an unsuspected way—as a database column in an ever-growing number of art collections. Major art museums adopted it as an organising element of their online catalogues.[4]
Museums present their online databases as neutral resources which often lack acknowledgment of editorial work and instead derive their legitimacy from the reputation of the institution.[5] While they increasingly influence how we (and machines) look at and learn about art, their protocols are rarely discussed. In contrast to the tradition of scholarly argumentation, the context in the database is given by the way its data are interconnected, where each item is defined by the set of its relations to other items. Rather than notions supporting the argument, styles and movements are vectors along which an online collection is designed to be viewed, queried, and referred to. This enables databases to position artworks as belonging to particular styles and movements by the mere designation of a relation.[6] Even though art collections databases are heir to the art-historical tradition, they adjust art to the logic of the relational database—the logic of organising data into rows and columns containing items pointing at one another. The same holds for other attributes of artworks, pre-formatted by the database as lists of authors, materials, years of production, and so on.
#art #styles #mouvements :)
