In MOMA’s Inventing Abstraction online interactive visual network, each node is a modern artist, all of whom have contributed to the formal abstraction of art in European art history from 1910 to 1925. The artists were all featured in the MOMA exhibit, Inventing Abstraction. The edges appear to be proof of an acquaintance between these artists within these years. The online interactive guide allows users to see the entire web and then select individual nodes to see only the connections of one artist. From that closer view you can select any of the connected artists and the diagram will swing over to display that artist’s connections. In this way, viewers can bounce around the nodes while still having a clearer view of the connections between artists. Each artist has their own blurb with their name, years, works in the exhibit, places worked, and interests. The interests are sometimes silly, for example, Picasso’s interests include guitar. What’s impressive is that they digitized the entire exhibit with high quality images and the entire captions that you would see in a museum space. Despite all this information, some of the artists themselves have far less information in their artist blurb than others which gives the impression that the project is in some way incomplete and still needs someone to go back and fill in the blanks. It seems that the primary goal of this graphic is to sort the pieces that are in the exhibit by artist and show the connections between them. However, the artists, not the pieces, are the primary data set, so not providing information on the artists seems like a failure on the organizing front. Perhaps they could have recognized the data to center on the works rather than the artists.
The project was designed by second story, an online marketing and digital design team. The main graphic was created by the exhibitions curatorial and design team at MOMA.
3 thoughts on “Blog post week 4- Network analysis- Maddie Smith”
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That is quite a cool DH project, I find it interesting and also odd that they chose to include the interests of the artists with the example you mentioned being Picasso’s guitar interest. I think that the issue you raise of the odd way of organizing the data. I also found it incredibly hard to navigate being 3d instead of 2d. The other ones of a similar type had you pan around so rotating the visualization took awhile to get used to.
Sounds like an interesting project! I definitely agree that the system of organization by artist is unhelpful if there’s not enough information about the artists. I do like the concept of it though; I wonder if this kind of project would lead people to create similar network visualizations with other time periods in art history!
This is a cool project! I have always found the dynamic and relationships between people at the top of the same field interesting. I wonder if a connection means that the artists were friends, or could they have been rivals too? It’s also interesting to see which artists have a lot of connections with other artists and how varied their interests and experiences are, perhaps explaining their connections.