Against Digital Art History

Digital Art History has a fraught relationship to history and interpretation. Against Digital Art History

Claire Bishop

Abstract: This article responds to two issues affecting the field of contemporary art history: digital technology and the so-called computational turn in the humanities. It is divided into two parts: the first connects problems with “digital art history,” an offspring of digital humanities, to neoliberal metrics; the second suggests how digital art history’s “distant reading” might nevertheless be deployed critically in the analysis of contemporary art.

Keywords: Computational, digital, metrics, reading

Part One1

First, let me clarify that I am not Drucker nevertheless imagines that talking about digitized art history (i.e., future digital databases will permit the use of online image collections) but new questions to be asked of canonical rather digital art history, that is, the works; she imagines, for example, a use of computational methodologies database containing the provenance and analytical techniques enabled by history of different sources of pigments new technology: visualization, network used in Western manuscript illu mi na analysis, topic modeling, simulation, tion and Renaissance painting, which pattern recognition, aggregation of would situate a work like Van Eyck’s materials from disparate geographical Arnolfini Wedding (1434) in relation to locations, etc. Some of these techniques global systems of trade and economic have been around for several decades value. Her vision of digital art history and have proven useful, especially for thus stands as a combination of digital scholars working on periods where technologies, network analysis, and there is little surviving visual evidence connoisseurship. (e.g., reconstructing ancient sites). Yet the visual theorist Johanna Drucker, Rather than thinking in terms of writing in 2013, states that so far theoretical changes, however, we should none of art history’s “fundamental ap compare the incursion of digital repro proaches, tenets of belief, or methods duction into art history to previous are altered by digital work”—unlike in technological innovations. Prior to the 1980s, when “traditional art his the late nineteenth century, art histor tory” was upended by the incursion of ians employed originals, casts, prints, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, sketches, and verbal descriptions to feminism, post-colonial theory, and support and disseminate their research post-structuralism (Drucker 2013).2 (Nelson 2000). The introduction of Against Digital Art History

photographic reproduction enabled (PCA) of over six thousand Impressionist wholly new method ol o gi cal ap paintings, calculating visual similarities proaches in art history—from the for in content and coloration.3 Another malism of Heinrich Wölfflin, who in paper, by K. Bender, analyzes 1,840 troduced the slide comparison to the works of art from the thirteenth to the art history lecture in the 1880s, to twentieth centuries showing the figure the iconographical approach of Aby of Aphrodite or Venus, revealing that Warburg in the 1920s, who drew upon on average, artists turned to this theme a vast archive of photographic repro 2.8 times in their lives (Bender 2015). ductions from antiquity to advertising A third article reports the results of to advance his theory of nachleben. The feeding 120,000 portraits from the change wrought by the digitization of thirteenth to the twentieth centuries slide collections since 2000 is therefore through facial-recognition software in not only one of size and speed (an in order to establish whether the “canon creased quantity of images for analysis of beauty” had changed over time (de la and faster search returns), but also one Rosa and Suárez 2015). Unsurprisingly, of method, opening the door to “dis it had—the study concludes that there tant viewing.” Already well known is a conspicuous decrease of “beauty” in in Comparative Literature as “distant the twentieth century. Only to someone reading,” this method proceeds by entirely unfamiliar with modernism subjecting vast numbers of cultural would this come as a surprise. artifacts to quantitative computational analysis. I admit that most academic papers, when boiled down to one line, risk A troubling introduction to this sounding simplistic, but in this case method can be found in the first issue of the fatuity is extreme. Basic terms like the International Journal for Digital Art beauty (and even portraiture) remain History, launched in June 2015. In the uninterrogated; instead, the authors first of six articles, new media theorist observe that the “more average and Lev Manovich introduces five key terms symmetri cal, the more beautiful a face from data science that he believes to be is usually ranked,” noting with appro val useful to art historians: object, features, that this criterion turns “a subjective data, feature space, and dimension opinion such as what face is beauti reduction (Manovich 2015). His text is ful into something measurable and illustrated with examples of his own objective” (ibid.). A complex human research projects that draw upon Big evaluation is reduced to statistical Data, including Selfiecity(visualizations calculation. Equally blunt is the claim, of thousands of Instagram selfies found in almost every essay in this in different cities around the globe, journal’s inaugural issue, that “this assessing the images in terms of age, empirical finding has never before been gender, position, frequency of smiling, highlighted in art history”—as if novelty etc.) and a principle content analysis were a sufcient measure of interest and

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substance. Further, the data set afrms sidelines, were repositioned as key the art historical canon (“Impressionist players: Sonia Delaunay and Natalia paintings,” “figures of Aphrodite or Goncharova were ranked as the Venus”) rather than challenging it “most connected” alongside Jean Arp, or even addressing it critically. Who Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, decides what is understood as the Tristan Tzara, and Alfred Stieglitz. canon? What is left out? On the evidence But what does it really mean to be of these articles, practitioners of digital “connected”? As art history doctoral art history have a limited awareness of students Jonathan Patkowski and critical debates within art history (such Nicole Reiner argue in their critique as the long-standing, and some would of the exhibition, this map recodes say long-dead, question of “beauty”), the early twentieth-century artist as a but also a limited grasp on how to contemporary networked entrepreneur frame a meaningful research question. whose importance is now gauged in Theoretical problems are steamrollered terms of number of social connections flat by the weight of data. (i.e., documentable acquaintances) rather than artistic innovations (Pat This silence, however, seems to be to kowski and Reiner 2013). Carefully rea digital art history’s advantage. This new soned historical narrative is replaced approach is already finding its way into by social network (the avant-garde museums, and not just conservation equivalent of LinkedIn) and has no departments that have long had a re room for non-human agents that lationship to scientific research. Con elude quantification—such as African sider the network map produced by artifacts, which were crucial to the the Museum of Modern Art, New development of abstraction, or the York, for the exhibition “Inventing Ab imperial powers that mobilized their straction 1910–1925” (2012–13), created circulation in Europe. by the curators in collaboration with a professor and a doctoral student My point is that subordinating art at Columbia University’s business history—whether the invention of school.4 The map, an update of Barr’s abstraction, Impressionist painting, or well-known diagram for the catalogue the new genre of the selfie—to com Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), covered putational analysis might well reveal a wall at the entrance to the exhibition. “empirical findings never before On the exhibition website, the map highlighted in art history,” but this allows users to click on various names, method also perpetuates uncritical mapped geospatially from the West to assumptions about the intrinsic value the East, in order to see which artists of statistics. In Undoing the Demos were in contact with whom during (2015), Wendy Brown argues that this period. One positive outcome neoliberalism should be regarded less of this mapping was that several fe as a political formation than as a form male artists, usually relegated to the of reason, a system of governance in

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which “all spheres of existence are study that mobilizes Big Data needs to framed and measured by economic reflect critically on the mechanisms by terms and metrics, even when those which this data is gathered: corporate spheres are not directly monetized” data mining, state surveillance, and (Brown 2015, 10). Her examples include algorithmic governance techniques.7 any online activity that measures output by the number of “likes” or “followers,” Digital art history, as the belated tail from Facebook and Instagram to online end of the digital humanities, signals a dating. Digital art history is just such change in the character of knowledge a subordination of human activity to and learning. Ideals like public service, metric evaluation. It is inextricably citizenship, knowledge as an end linked to the ascendancy of the digital in itself, and questions of what is humanities, which has flourished just, right, and true have decreasing despite financial cuts to the “analog validity because they resist quantitative humanities”, and which is seen as a way measurement, and moreover do not to make humanities’ outputs “useful”— easily translate into information that like science, technology, engineering, optimizes the performance of society and mathematics (i.e., industry- (i.e. generate) profit. Instead, research preferred STEM subjects).5 In the words and knowledge are understood in of new media scholar Richard Grusin, terms of data and its exteriorization “It is no coincidence that the digital in computational analyses. This raises humanities has emerged as ‘the next the question of whether there is a big thing’ at the same moment that the basic incompatibility between the neoliberalization and corporatization of humanities and computational metrics. higher education has intensified in the Is it possible to enhance the theoretical first decades of the twenty-first century” interpretations characteristic of the (Grusin 2013). This is not to say that the humanities with positivist, empiri digital humanities are doomed to be the cal methods—or are they incom men unwitting handmaidens of neoliberal surable? imperatives, but it is important to note how its technopositivist rationality We have to be careful how we is disturbingly synchronous with phrase this dilemma. Drucker floats the marketization of education: the the possibility—although she eventu promotion of MOOCs as value-for- ally rejects the idea—that visual art money content delivery; the precarious might be fundamentally resistant to position of adjunct professors; the computational processing and analysis tyranny of academic rankings; and because it is so emphatically tied up in the remaking of the university away narratives of singularity, individuality, from “quaint concerns with developing and exceptionality. These valorizing the person and citizen” and toward a terms are of course not exclusive to model of the student as self-investing art history and play an important role human capital (Brown 2015, 23).6 Any in canon formation across all of the

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humanities. We know from Franco interpretation through the hypothesis- Moretti’s controversial method of “dis free discovery of phenomena” (Liu tant reading”—analyzing literature not 2013).10 In this model, topics are ge by studying particular texts, but by nerated without an initial concept or aggregating massive amounts of data— question from an interpreter looking to that singular genius is one of the first confirm a theme or pattern; computers concepts to fall by the wayside when read texts/images algorithmically, with dealing with literature as an integrated minimal human intervention. In the system of global publishing. On the one case of Manovich’s Cultural Analytics hand, this is appealing: who among us (a hybrid new interdiscipline), data could really argue that the canon isn’t are aestheticized into patterns, but the too white, male, and European? And task of interpreting these patterns is Moretti is right to observe that close left up to others.11 As a result, digital readings can become a “theological art history has a fraught relationship exercise—very solemn treatment of to history and interpretation. Does very few texts taken very seriously” the data set exist in history before (Moretti 2000).8 When you glance being sequenced digitally or is it only at Moretti’s work—such as Graphs, actualized once it has been laid out via Maps, Trees (2007)—it is conspicuous the digital archive? Are the assembled that paradigmatic examples and historical “facts” found or produced? block quotes have been replaced with What’s the relation between what’s diagrams, models, and schemas, but at empirically observable and what’s true? least these graphs trigger interpretation: Technology is presumed to provide a social history supported by statistics objective access to reality in a way that rather than text mining the number subjective interpretation cannot. The of times a given word appears in result is an avoidance of argumentation Proust.9 Moretti’s earlier work, prior and interpretation, as exemplified by to setting up the Stanford Literary the articles in the International Journal Lab in 2010, is especially interesting of Digital Art History.12 Computational in trying to analyze all literature from metrics can help aggregate data and in a given period, both canonical and dicate patterns, but they struggle to ex noncanonical; questions of historical plain causality, which in the human ities causality remain central for him, in is always a question of interpretation. part because they are the blind spot In effect, a post-historical position is of distant reading, the argument that assumed: the data is out there, gathered statistics cannot supply. and complete; all that remains is for scholars to sequence it at will. Here, Yet, increasingly, Moretti—like Lev computational methods become an Manovich—proceeds with the data set in other manifestation of the drive for advance of a research question, or what mastery over history and the archive. digital humanist Alan Liu calls “tabula The analog humanities, by contrast, rasa interpretation—the initiation of remain outside the logic of tidy de

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liverable answers; their importance, as shot in mind, and gallery lighting has media theorist Gary Hall notes, lies in become brighter so that photographs their ability to hold open a space for ‘pop’ on a back-lit plasma screen. “much-needed elements of dissensus, Works of art are bought and sold as dysfunction, ambiguity, conflict, un jpgs, without collectors ever having predictabili ty, inaccessibility, and inef seen the original in person. ficiency” (Hall 2013, 798). My current project, “Déjà Vu: Re formatting Modernist Architecture,” has engaged in a type of distant read ing—one that could only have been Part Two realized with the assistance of digital technology, but which is steered by a Contemporary art, perhaps more critical human eye. In the slideshow than any other art form, is entire that accompanies the lecture version ly embroiled in digital technology: of “Déjà Vu,” I replace the singular, it permeates the production of work, paradigmatic example with hundreds its consumption and circulation. It is of case studies—works of art gathered noticeable that artists are increasingly from North and South America and turning to cut-and-paste methods to Eastern and Western Europe since 1989. create work across a wide variety of Over three hundred images scroll before media. Pre-existing cultural artifacts viewers, in different combinations; the are remixed and reformatted, generat aim is to move beyond the traditional ing a mise-en-abyme of references to illustrative slide comparison to a sce previous historical eras. As part of this nario in which the images begin to historical orientation, obsolete tech create an argument in their own nologies have acquired a new auratic right, bolstering (but also at moments currency (8 and 16mm film, slide contesting) my interpretation. Over projectors, fax machines, even VCR the course of an hour, the audience players), as has the trope of the archive. experiences a number of déjà vus: works We are currently in a hybrid moment of art, all of which take as their starting where non- or pre-digital materiality point a pre-existing work of modernist is sustained alongside a digital way of architecture or design (including iconic thinking: an approach to information structures by Le Corbusier, Oscar in which sources are decontextualized, Niemeyer, and Vladimir Tatlin), also remixed, reorganized, and archived. recur in different sequences.13 The title This hybridized interpenetration of refers to Paolo Virno’s theory of déjà digital and non-digital extends to the vu as a distanciation from agency: he distribution and consumption of art. describes it as a patho logical condition Today, most exhibitions reach their of watching ourselves live and feeling audiences as jpgs: artists increasingly that the future has been fatalistically mount their shows with the installation prescribed for us, and connects this

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Distant reading serves as a critique of the system in which these works thrive.

condition to the post-political consensus the highlights of modernism already after 1989.14 Something of this fatalism witnessed, the projects by artists is conveyed in the relentlessness of my that are unquotable because they are PowerPoint, which generates the feeling themselves so reliant upon quotation. of scrolling through a tide of images (as when searching online), and yet each Distant reading serves as a critique work appears before us, rather than of the system in which these works being aggregated into a single graphic thrive: not just the rapidity of image visualization. The PowerPoint partly circulation online, but also the New repeats the numbing effect of the online York art world, with its thousands of image world, but also becomes a tool to commercial galleries and their dis make this available to interpretation. proportionate impact upon museum practice, all of which creates an in Given that the rise of this artistic creasingly off-putting haze of hype trend is a convergence of ideological and high finance around contemporary narratives about a geopolitical con art. This condition is rarely resisted dition (“the end of history”) encoun by artists here, who leave art schools tering the proliferation of digital with huge debts and need to get on media, this flow of images generates the career ladder as soon as possible an argument about repetition and in order to start repaying loans. The banality without me having to spell MFA-debt/gallery-profit cycle has made it out verbally. The slideshow has oc it increasingly difcult to write about casionally infuriated audiences, who contemporary art without also wanting see it as leveling the specificity of to run a mile from it. Distant viewing artists’ practices in different parts of the is my expression of this distance. The world, and ignoring attempts to chart disjunctive simultaneity of proximity gender or race through the quotation and distance is also the condition of of modernist forebears (even though consuming images in the twenty- my text draws out these historical and first century and thus the subject of ideological differences). My reason for my paper as much as its method. As presenting images in this “distant,” non- such, I hope that my project functions hierarchical way is that I believe there as a critical intervention both into a are no paradigmatic examples of this contemporary art history that seems trend, and that the differences between always to bolster singular figures for these works are less significant than the market, and into a digital art history their similarities. My target is the that privileges computational over mainstream, the mediocre, the déjà vu: ideological analyses. the work we feel like we’ve seen before,

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theory of the longue durée, Moretti argues Notes that the novel developed as a system of its genres (in other words, we cannot speak of 1 This paper was written for a conference “the novel” but only of a whole set of forty- on new methods in the humanities at Duke four genres). Looking at the publication rates University in November 2016 and first published for novels over periods of decades, he moves on their website https://humanitiesfutures.org/ from quantitative facts to speculation and papers/digital-art-history/ interpretation; for example, he suggests that the 2 Drucker draws the useful distinction between rise and fall of the various genres of the novel digitized and digital art history on page 5. in the United Kingdom correlate to twenty-five- 3 Selfiecity can be found online at www. to thirty-five-year cycles (i.e., to generations of selfiecity.net. The main findings include the readers) (Moretti 2007). Earlier work, such as following: more women take selfies than men “Conjectures in World Literature,” provocatively and strike more extreme poses; the average conclude that the modern novel first arises age of selfie photographers is 23.7; people in not as an autonomous development but as a Moscow smile less than people in São Paulo compromise between a western formal influence and Bangkok. The project used Amazon’s (usually French or English) and local materials”; Mechanical Turk workers to classify 640 selfies in other words, the Western European novel is from each city, taken from a random sample of an exception, not the rule (Moretti 2000). 120,000 images from Instagram. 10 This can be seen, for example, in Moretti’s 4 Paul Ingram and Mitali Banerjee, www. quantification of the plot of Shakespeare’s moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/ Hamlet (Moretti 2011). inventingabstraction/?page=connections 11 See Gary Hall’s incisive critique of Manovich 5 The term analog humanities is taken from (Hall 2013). Sterne 2015, 18. 12 Likewise, the authors of the paper on beauty 6 The Washington Post recently reported that and portraiture conclude that “any approach to Purdue University (Indiana) has partnered with the culturomics of art history and beauty also businesses as an alternative to student loans: takes into account cultural evolution and cultural investors front students the money to pay for history as forces that shape the results we find education in exchange for a share in future in the data”—without feeling any obligation to earnings (Douglas-Gabriel 2015). supply this (Rosa and Suárez 2015, 125). 7 This problem is not confined to digital art 13 This type of work is near unsearchable on the history. As English/Comp Lit scholar Brian Internet because search engines cannot cope Lennon notes, “. . .the digital humanities has with self-reflexivity (contemporary art quoting displayed almost no specifically political interest modern art). My examples were therefore in the world outside the university and too amassed slowly, via exhibition catalogues, little explicit interest of any kind in the broader artists’ websites, press releases, Tumblrs, and interinstitutional politics of the world within the blogs. university in its imbrication with the institutions 14 Post-politics is a term used by political of security and military intelligence” (Lennon philosophers—including Jacques Rancière, 2014, 140–41). Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek, and Jodi Dean— 8 For a concise response, see Schulz (2011). to describe the post-ideological consensus that 9 Influenced by historian Ferdinand Braudel’s dominated global politics after the Cold War. References

Bender, K. 2015. “Distant Viewing in Art History, A Case Study of Artistic Productivity.” International Journal for Digital Art History 1: 100–110.

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Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Douglas-Gabriel, Danielle. 2015. “Investors Buying Shares in College Students.” Washington Post, November 27. Drucker, Johanna. 2013. “Is There a ‘Digital’ Art History?”Visual Resources 29 (March): 7. Grusin, Richard. 2013. “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities.” Thinking C21 blog. http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-2 Hall, Gary. 2013. “Toward a Postdigital Humanities.” American Literature 85 (4): 781–809. Lennon, Brian. 2014. “The Digital Humanities and National Security.”differences 25 (1): 132–55. Liu, Alan. 2013. “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.”PMLA 128 (2): 414. Manovich, Lev. 2015. “Data Science and Digital Art History,” International Journal for Digital Art History 1: 12–35. www.dah-journal.org Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1: Jan–Feb. http://www.newleftreview.org/II/1/franco-moretti-conjectures-on-world-literature ———. 2007. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso. ———. 2011. Network Theory, Plot Analysis.”New Left Review 68: March–April. http:// www.newleftreview.org/II/68/franco-moretti-network-theory-plot-analysis Nelson, Robert. 2000. “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Critical Inquiry 26: 414–34. Patkowski, Jonathan, and Nicole Reiner. 2013. “Inventing Abstraction, Reinventing Our Selves,” Material World blog, February 23. www.materialworldblog.com/2013/02/ inventing-abstraction-reinventing-our-selves de la Rosa, Javier, and Juan-Luis Suárez. 2015. “A Quantitative Approach to Beauty: Perceived Attractiveness of Human Faces in World Painting.”International Journal for Digital Art History 1: 112–29. Schulz, Kathryn. 2011. “What Is Distant Reading?” New York Times, June 24. http:// www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-what-is-distant- reading.html Sterne, Jonathan. 2015. “The Example: Some Historical Considerations.” In Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Virno, Paul. 2015. Déjà Vu and the End of History. New York: Verso. Previously published in 1999.

Claire Bishop is Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Correspondence e-mail: [email protected]

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