Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

The categorization of art (paintings, literature) into distinct styles such as expressionism, or surrealism has had
a profound influence on how art is presented, marketed, analyzed, and historicized. Here, we present results
from several perceptual experiments with the goal of determining whether such categories also have a perceptual
foundation. Following experimental methods from perceptual psychology on category formation, naive, non-expert
participants were asked to sort printouts of artworks from different art periods into categories. Converting these
data into similarity data and running a multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) analysis, we found distinct perceptual
categories which did in some cases correspond to canonical art periods. Initial results from a comparison with
several computational algorithms for image analysis and scene categorization are also reported.