art styles

art styles

Exploring the Evolution and Impact of Art Styles

1. Introduction to Art Styles

The visual arts world is notable for its continuous generation of new styles and styles within styles, which compete for space and time. To gain an understanding of the influence these styles bear on ordinary visual experience and cultural identity, we set out to create a quantitative model of style appearance. There are many reasons to model art styles. As part of the visual world that directly impacts us, the rise and fall of visual art styles often marks important cultural, social, and technological transitions, also illustrated in many art and history texts. Understanding style can provide insights into the creations produced in different periods, such as which style solutions were successful at the time and in which way they were successful. Understanding and capturing stylistic characteristics are essential for computationally modeling and retargeting them, allowing the user to compose and/or manipulate visual content using a specific style.

Artistic styles change rapidly over time, but the impact they have on visual and cultural experience is long lasting. To provide insights into these processes, we introduce a novel, nonlinear model of art style evolution. This model treats individual pieces of art not as unique and special objects but as points in a high-dimensional style space, one that organizes the entire ensemble through a broad distribution of styles. We also introduce a mechanism for understanding the impact of new appearance styles, which not only seeds the future with new styles but also represents the channel through which art can change the course of history. We ground our work in a new data set of 2.5 million paintings in which we have identified numerous influential styles and inferred the times of their creation. We identify the key features of an influential style: we argue that such styles differ significantly from earlier works, are more widely practiced than later influential works in a given period, and increase in complexity with time.

2. Historical Development of Major Art Movements

Artists created art of varying styles almost as soon as they began to produce their images. One of the first attempts to classify art based on its aesthetics was by Giordano Bruno in his work “The Art of Memory” (1766), in which he used a quasi-aesthetic aid by placing sculptures of images appealing to remember around a room. Dante Alighieri in “Convivio” also attempted an early aesthetic classification of art. Since then, there have been numerous attempts to categorize art based on similarities in each art genre. For example, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Blanc, and some French artists of the time, and a handful of other aestheticians and artists attempted to systematize the major art styles significant at that time for Europeans. Theories of chronological styles are frequently embedded in artworks.

In this study, we consider the 62 major art movements and styles and their significant submovements and splinter groups. With the extensive coverage and thorough attention to listing, labeling, and coding for 165 significant submovements, this study offers one hundred and sixty-two different submovements in addition to the fifty-nine art groups. To the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive analysis of the development of art styles of this magnitude. Therefore, this study fills a critical gap by investigating how naturally occurring patterns of art styles evolve over time.

3. Characteristics and Key Figures of Prominent Art Styles

We adhere to a strict chronology in this history in the hope that it will reveal how each style builds on what has come before. But these lines of growth resemble real evolution in at least one more significant way than just following a time sequence. As with real families or species, we find various mixtures, mutations, throwbacks, and reversions to be scattered along the line of descent. Once fully defined, a style is more likely to flourish in its proper historical place, and then to gradually decline. But a basically modern artist endures, then, as now, because he has his own problems and interests, and uses the whole of our rich heritage of visual form as his raw material. Rather than anticipating some future style or idea, the pioneering artists put down deep and lasting roots in the comfortably familiar and time-honored, and they continue as active forces in culture as we ever will, because they are not restricted by their styles, just decorated by them.

4. Influence of Art Styles on Society and Culture

In other words, social evolution tends to be characterized by shared cultural forms that are transmitted from one generation to another, and in the absence of such cultural transference, the possibility of historical continuity is lost. Also, the societal influence on artistic style formation is very complex and multifactorial. The catalyst to change cultural heritage, meaning the cultural expression shared collectively in a community, can only be the strong collective formation, whereas an individual alone rarely changes the past.

Another consideration is that the role of cultural heritage is increasingly important, both as a part of the human cultural legacy and as a strong influence on the identity of a society. We have seen a growing interest in historical and cultural heritage both in developed countries, but especially among developing countries, which see in this recognition an opportunity to promote the economic and nature protection of the cultural landscape, with a positive impact on the local and national development. A society’s cultural period is frequently defined by its art styles and, in particular, when we want to distinguish two societies that have a shared set of cultural periods, a combination of the art of the different societies becomes necessary.

The most logical place to consider the influence of art styles is their relationship with the development of a society since both art and cultural development are reflections of each other. Evolutions in society are likewise characterized by two related concepts: revolution and evolution, where a revolution is indicative of a conflict or an event leading to extensive, notable changes, while evolution is about the gradual development or changes in a stable or well-established system. These concepts are part of the social dynamics in human systems, and their mark is particularly relevant in the transition stages, that is, between two well-defined societies, or during a period of crisis, reflecting cultural, social, and economic changes in a given society.

5. Contemporary Trends and Future Directions in Art Styles

Art style refers broadly to visual techniques and formal properties that are characteristic of a particular artist, era, or movement. Proper understanding of art styles depends on discarding the traditional art historical narrative, where each relevant art style is an inevitable success of evolutionary changes. Explicit and coherent terms are necessary for research in computer graphics, computer vision, visualization, and other fields where automatic analysis or procedural generation of art is desired. Further, we attempt to resolve some ambiguous or similar terms without ambiguity and review the work in these areas. The general space scope of this survey is whether the work uses one or more examples of art as input or as an output.

This chapter reviews contemporary trends and speculates on the future direction of art styles. First, contemporary trends and previous distinctions concerning contemporary art styles are discussed. The core of the chapter is about the potential future directions of art styles. Examples of particular interest in the near-term include increasing diversity and the potential rise of post-digital maxims. Longer-term implications for latent space visual exploration, generative art, and co-creative agents are discussed. Several outstanding conceptual and practical issues that inform this vision are highlighted, including future platforms, living styles, the politics of opacity, and the markets of art styles.