CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM

Constructive Criticism

Constructive Criticism

In this paper, we call pictorial content the combination of the artistic style and of the visual features of the represented subject contained in an artwork. This content contributes to the visual impression delivered to a human observer. In an abstract painting, ideas, emotions, and visual sensations are communicated solely through lines, shapes, colors, and textures that have no representational significance. The psychological effect delivered by the pictorial content, or pictorial effect, is one part of the socalled aesthetic effect. However, since computational methods do not succeed in describing the representational content, the aesthetic effect cannot be fully extracted. The semantic gap is still a topical research problem in computer vision. This gap is even wider in the visual arts field since pictures are often not perfectly realistic. We therefore limit our study to the pictorial level of analysis.

Verbally analyzing a work of art can be compared to the scientific practice of animal dissection. To dissect an animal is to learn more about it, that which would not be learned from studying its physical exterior. Although we can only analyze a work of art by looking at it, we can learn much more from thinking in depth about each of its physical characteristics, discerning the technical processes used in its making, considering both its content and context, postulating the artist's conceptual reasoning and intentions, describing our personal interpretation and physiological/emotional reactions, and comparing/contrasting all of these aforementioned qualities to other works of art that seem relevant.

The analysis of the pictorial content is useful in many applications for identifying and retrieving similar artworks in cultural heritage databases [SGJD06]. It is also useful for non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) of scences in computer graphics that produces the same pictorial effect as some real artworks.

The pictorial content is partially related to the artistic style. The ...