Robert Storr's criticism is pretty vacuous. Crying reductionism is so common as a criticism of scientific approaches from people in the humanities as to be almost an absurd cliché by now. Pity that he either couldn't come up with something more interesting to say or that the Times couldn't be bothered to quote him on something more substantive.
As someone from the scientific side, I would say it's often at least somewhat accurate, and scientists really do frequently take embarrassingly reductive approaches when trying to dip their toes into digital-humanities work, without having read enough of the relevant background material. It's cliche as a criticism, sure. So is the accusation that a lot of humanities/theory work is too "fuzzy". But both criticisms are perceived as cliche precisely because the errors they point out are so common.
The classification of works of art is a far cry from, say, taxonomy in biology. I'd submit that there's nothing really scientific about it. But even if there were, let me just quote David Perkins summarizing Benedetto Croce (on literature, but the point is transferable):
The individual quality or difference of a work of art is the special locus of its value. Since taxonomies are based on features texts share, they foreground what is least interesting about them.
That's rather a lot of assumptions packed into a seemingly logical conclusion.
I think it's perfectly possible for a text to be appreciated because of the way it executes a specific topic or genre, such that its quality is not something individual or different.
Secondly I can imagine taxonomies which are not based on shared textual features, but on chronological, geographical, and genre features.
Thirdly, I don't see why a shared feature would automatically be the "least interesting". What's interesting is rather subjective and context-dependent. If for example I had a particular interest in literature coming out of the first world war, this shared feature could be at the top of my list.
It is indeed a lot of assumptions and also ignores, for example, the fact that those shared and least-interesting features are still, in many cases, what people like most about things, which would make it a good approach for a recommendation engine even though it's a bad approach for critical work. Musical and narrative genres are rife with this kind of 'subscription mentality'[1]: people who simply enjoy the genre and will like almost any entry into it.
> Secondly I can imagine taxonomies which are not based on shared textual features, but on chronological, geographical, and genre features.
Note that these aren't meant to be excluded by the quote, which is from a book that deals largely with the three things you mention. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte and all that.
> Thirdly, I don't see why a shared feature would automatically be the "least interesting". What's interesting is rather subjective and context-dependent. If for example I had a particular interest in literature coming out of the first world war, this shared feature could be at the top of my list.
No doubt, but the quote is specifically concerned with literary/artistic value. Historians or critics reading through a different lens will of course have different interests and see value in different things.
Would you not agree, though, that a particular interest in literature coming out of the first world war is simply a filter for your data set, and that once you get down to specific works, it's how they differ or assert themselves against one another that is most interesting about them?
1. I just made that phrase up; someone may have come up with a better one already. But you know the type: the inveterate sci-fi fan, the fantasy aficionado, the lover of all things zombie. These people are less concerned with the quality of a particular work than with the genre trappings it exhibits.
I think that if your theory is that the quality is in the sum total of all differences with other works, then it's not saying much. On the surface, texts are unique as snow flakes, so that's not a useful perspective. Some differences or features will surely play a larger role than others in determining quality. For the features that matter, commonalities might be more interesting than differences.
I think there might not be an effective difference between a particular interest acting like a filter, and the rest of the differences identifying a work. They appear to be different because the former is explicit and particular, but in the end our taste is conceivably described as a filter.
And I don't see why this couldn't pertain to literary or artistic value. You seem to suggest that shared features automatically imply genre works which are typically deemed of lower value. If artistic value is said to only reside in an ineffable difference of the whole work, then to me this is just a cop out to avoid having to define what that value actually is.
> I think that if your theory is that the quality is in the sum total of all differences with other works, then it's not saying much.
I wouldn't say that quality and value are the same thing. Oftentimes works of questionable quality are incredibly valuable because they open up new domains for other artists to develop.
> On the surface, texts are unique as snow flakes, so that's not a useful perspective.
This isn't true at all. In fact, most people, even trained critics, have trouble telling writers apart, let alone texts. There are exceptions, of course -- mostly the avant-garde, because you know when you're reading Joyce or Pound -- but even then the vast majority of people can't distinguish the real thing from a parody. When I was in grad school a quiz (http://reverent.org/poetry_or_parody.html) made its way through our poetry seminar, and it was hilarious. Two of us missed only one; the rest missed at least six! I just retook it now, three years later, and missed three, so I guess I'm losing my touch.
> Some differences or features will surely play a larger role than others in determining quality.
Of course, but again, quality <> value. Also I'm not sure what you're responding to with this thought. There's nothing about 'sum totals' or anything like that in the Perkins quote, and I don't think I suggested it elsewhere.
> For the features that matter, commonalities might be more interesting than differences.
Do you have an example? The 'might' is important here: I agree that it's possible, but I can't think of an example. Most likely I would think the commonality would be some shared trope that the text then proceeds to spin off in an entirely different direction, so that the commonality is only interesting as staging for the difference. But I can be persuaded otherwise.
> I think there might not be an effective difference between a particular interest acting like a filter, and the rest of the differences identifying a work. They appear to be different because the former is explicit and particular, but in the end our taste is conceivably described as a filter.
I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but I think it's an interesting point: namely, that every difference is a difference from, so by shifting the context in which a work is understood, you've effectively changed what its commonalities with and differences from other works are. And that leads us down the oh-so-tricky rabbit hole of establishing contexts, e.g. via period (Romanticism), tradition (form, genre), and so on.
As far as taste being a filter, that just depends on the person. It's certainly possible to imagine tastes that can't be used as filters because they don't involve surface properties like genre trappings.
> You seem to suggest that shared features automatically imply genre works which are typically deemed of lower value.
I'm not suggesting either of those things. Shared features don't imply genre works (all works have shared features), and genre works aren't necessarily of lower value (they just attract certain audiences regardless of their value).
> If artistic value is said to only reside in an ineffable difference of the whole work
It's neither ineffable nor anything to do with the 'whole' work. I'm sure it seems abstract, with us talking about all of art in one go here, but once you get down to specific texts and contexts any competent critic is going to talk in excruciating detail about what specifically is valuable in a given work. At least, that's the idea -- in practice most professional critics are crap.
That texts are unique is simply an objective fact. As soon as you change just one letter, you have a new text with 'difference'. I'm saying this is not a useful perspective because it only gets interesting when you can point out what kind of difference there is and why it is important, and then you end up with something that higher quality texts may have in common.
While critics may have some difficulty telling authors or texts apart because of human limitations, computers attain very high accuracies with various authorship attribution methods. This underscores my point: if you focus on differences, you will end up identifying very particular things such as a particular author or even the style of a particular work, that's just the idea taken to its extreme.
On the other hand, I believe that the quality of a work, which is one kind of value indeed, can lie in commonalities instead of differences. I don't have a concrete example, but from reading literature I do get the feeling that there is something definite that they share. I don't mean something on the level of a trope, that would be too superficial. I think it's OK to admit that we don't know, but not a good idea to preclude it from being described as part of a taxonomy because it's supposedly only about differences. There's simply too much difference in all the unique things around us for that to be informative.
Given that the NYT was giving so much air time to a new company, they probably felt obligated to print a critical point of view as well in order to seem "balanced".
Storr's flippant dismissal of Art.sy's taxonomy as "reductive" isn't even wrong – it's completely irrelevant. It's the same thing as complaining that Pandora's music genome is reductive. Obviously it's reductive. Applying a systematic taxonomy to music or art – or living creatures or languages or anything at all – clearly cannot capture the nuance and fullness of detail of the actual items to which the taxonomy applies (except my best friend's taxonomy of black metal, which I'm pretty sure has a subsubcategory for every song ever). But such systems aren't intended to do that. It's akin to complaining about the Library of Congress classification system because each book's classification doesn't fully specify its content. That's not the point of the system. It's a navigational and organizational aide, not a complete encoding.
A real critique would address the site's success as a navigational and organizational aide. I suspect that Storr uses texts full of reproductions of art in his classes. Does he also complain that they are "reductive" because they are imperfect reproductions of the original artworks? I doubt it. I bet he does, however, select the texts that serve the purpose of helping students of art understand the intellectual and artistic landscape better than others. It's completely absurd to complain that a textbook fails to reproduce the experience of seeing an artwork in person. Of course it doesn't. It is, however, helpful to discuss how a text does and doesn't succeed in providing an understanding of the space of art which it covers.
While I like your comment I do wonder whether it may rest on a misunderstanding of the work 'reductive'. I believe it is being used in the philosophy of science sense wherein reality can be understood in terms of the workings of components. It stands in contrast with holism, for example Quine's semantic holism.
To be fair, they spent a lot of time, beside the main Genome project, to build and try out interfaces to showcase artworks, which has always suffered a poor UX. It was in closed beta, though, but I had the chance to see their progress on this side and I can tell it is pretty amazing.
This is a really nice project with a very clean interface for browsing art. I've spent hours browsing different categories and links between related works. Their team has also made great contributions to open source projects.
I tried it out and some of the connections are dubious to say the least, for example for the photographer Robert Frank the first related artists is Timothy H. O'Sullivan, which has very little in common with Frank. The same was found with many other artist's I am familiar with. I guess it's just starting out and will improve with time, I presume if I were to create an account I would be able to feedback into the system to fix errors.
Painting seemed to fair much better in its relationships, possibly because the artists are more cleanly defined.
Yea the simplicity is really great. There is a ton of content getting displayed all at once, but it doesn't seem cluttered. You can easily browse all the information and be delighted at the same time.
It looks great, I am just a little confused by it as there doesnt seem to be any real navigational hierarchy. I'll continue playing around because I love the idea of the service
That's because you have no idea how much non technical legwork has to go in place to build something. They had to develop personal relations with thousands of finicky galleries, then somehow convince them to try this new thing, digitizing their art. They had all sorts of fusses about the details of just about everything, every step of the way. See how Art.sy tries to prevent image scraping, for example. There's a lot more behind the scenes.
