The internet is great, but I want more.
Let’s start with an example.
Jonas just had a party at his house and his friend Ed left a CD on top of the stereo. Jonas listens to the CD and absolutely loves it. His music player of choice tells him it is The New Pornographers. Jonas goes over to pandora.com and types it in. Now he gets exposed to The Oohlas.
Discovering The Oohlas was just that simple for Jonas.
With helpful sites like pandora.com (based on The Music Genome Project) and liveplasma.com you can easily discover new bands, songs, movies, directors and actors that build off your current tastes.
Now I request: “Mighty Internet. Give me more!”. I want these types of sites for visual art. I want to go somewhere and type in an artists name and be shown a list of similar artists. I want to be able to upload a picture (or 5) that I really like and I want some algorithm to analyze this picture and give me one hundred or one thousand more pictures that might catch my eye. I want a site to give me (the uneducated art appreciator) an impression of what styles of art I am drawn too.
That shouldn’t be too much to ask. The Music Genome Project seems like it is a whole lot of work, but someone is doing it for the benefit of both the musicians and the listeners. My proposed project can start out by classifying the complete works of many famous painters and go from there. Once they get the process nailed down, aspiring artists can begin to upload their own pictures and add them to the genome.
So I am proposing that we find a minimum of 10 art history majors and 10 computer science majors to do our bidding. We can promise them riches (for the art history majors) and popularity (for the computer science majors) and we put them to work on this project.
I will, of course, leave it up to the more snooty people to debate the merits of creating an algorithm for labelling art or simply the merit of labelling art period. That’s not for me to do (and neither is setting up this project).
