Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods

Jaskot, Paul B.

doi:10.1080/01973762.2019.1553651

Cited by 13 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…Besides, from a scholarly perspective, the digitalization of the contemporary art market has contributed to the emergence of Art History 2.0 (Bailey and Gardiner 2010; Rodriguez-Ortega 2019) as a separate academic field. The acceptance of technological innovations as applied to online art market research has resulted in the creation of new methods of analysis and visualization of online art market data (Bentkowska-Kafel et al 2005; Hai-Jew 2017; Flanders and Jannidis 2019) and the establishment of digital archiving as a socially engaging and responsive practice of documentation of online art commerce (Bentkowska-Kafel et al 2009;Hatchwell et al 2019;Jaskot 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cyber Turn of the Contemporary Art Market

Sidorova

2019

Arts

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The paper addresses the issue of digitalization of the contemporary art market. It analyzes key features of today’s online art market and discusses three technological innovations—cryptocurrency, blockchain, and artificial intelligence—that have the potential to contribute to the further development and growth of online art trade. The paper demonstrates that whereas cyberspace attracts new talent and great business ideas intended to make global art commerce more versatile and efficient, online art market players alongside with providers of the online art market data and analytics offer interesting avenues of future research in this sector.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cyber Turn of the Contemporary Art Market

Sidorova

2019

Arts

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“…A third group of art historians is transforming social art history, using quantitative and computational methods like formal network analysis and regression analysis (a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between variables) to elucidate the social, economic, and political systems that prompted or facilitated the production of objects, buildings, and built landscapes. The historian of architecture Paul Jaskot has argued that digital methods allow art historians to reconstruct “the deep relationships between works of art, both banal and sophisticated, to the very workings of society itself” at scales that were previously unmanageable (Jaskot, 2019; see also Jaskot & Van der Graaff, 2017). One especially compelling case study in Diana Greenwald's Painting by Numbers : Data‐Driven Histories of Nineteenth‐Century Art combines information from historic exhibition catalogs with complementary economic data to argue that the decreasing price of train tickets transformed French visual culture in ways that historians of art have not fully recognized (Greenwald, 2021).…”

Section: Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital art history in 2021

Brey

2021

History Compass

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The past decade has seen tremendous growth and innovation in the use of digital resources, methods, and tools in the history of art and architecture. While digital art history is less developed than text‐based disciplines, the emergence of new digital standards for visual and spatial data, and advances in computer vision are poised to revolutionize the field. This article provides a survey of recent developments in digital art history from the perspective of European and North American publications and conferences. I discuss the digitization of visual, spatial, and textual resources by museums, research centers, and individual researchers. Researchers have developed a variety of tools for digitally analyzing art and architecture, which can replicate or challenge traditional methods of formal, iconographic, and socio‐historical analysis. Trends in published research indicate uneven growth in the theoretical sophistication of digital art history scholarship. While digital methods are quickly moving into the training of art history professionals and students, digital art history communities in museums, research institutes, and universities remain somewhat fragmented. I conclude with a reflection on critiques of digital art history, several of which have not been fully addressed in recent scholarship.

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“…Art historian Paul Jaskot has rightfully pointed out that "art history has institutional and market restrictions that make it structurally impossible for every subject, every position, and every methodology to be present and accounted for equally." 42 However, in the context of the science-inspired technical language often found in DAH literature, we need to constantly remind ourselves that no datasets are actually "given." Moreover, we need to address how the less celebrated or well-documented artworks in museums and other collecting institutions may be digitized and subsequently studied through digital methods.…”

Section: Cultures Of Digitization and The Future Of Art Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultures of Digitization: A Historiographic Perspective on Digital Art History

Dahlgren¹,

Wasielewski²

2020

Visual Resources

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Art museums began using computers to help organize, catalogue, and coordinate their collections as early as the 1960s. In more recent times, art historians have consolidated the use of digital tools in the discipline within the emerging field of Digital Art History (DAH). In this historiographic study, we set out to understand DAH through an analysis of existing scholarship in the field. Our method combined both text mining and close reading of three datasets of art history journal articles published in the last decade: DAH (International Journal of Digital Art History, special issues of Visual Resources), Art History, and Art Journal. We studied the topical focus of these journals, looking at which agents, materials, and methods dominate and how they are contextualized. Based on this, we found that the subject matter and topical focus of scholarship in DAH differs significantly from scholarship in Art History or Art Journal. More specifically, the historical concerns of museums with regard to digitization still dominate DAH compared to other scholarship in the field. We argue that there are a number of historical and practical reasons for this, including early adoption of computers within museums, the need for simplicity in digitization projects, and issues of copyright. The persistence of this affiliation, in turn, raises critical questions for the future of the field of art history, including who can access art historical datasets, and how and by whom they are created.

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Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

The Cyber Turn of the Contemporary Art Market

The Cyber Turn of the Contemporary Art Market

Digital art history in 2021

Cultures of Digitization: A Historiographic Perspective on Digital Art History

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