Eighty-five percent of artists whose work is found in collections of major U.S. museums are white, and 87 percent are male, according to new research by Chad Topaz of Williams College, MA, and colleagues. The study, published in PLOS ONE, also suggests that artist diversity is not strongly linked to a museum’s collection mission. Recent years...
There is an effective formula for unlocking employees’ creative potential, according to new research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin and the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Employers should incentivize workers to produce an abundance of ideas — even mediocre ones —...
Ever stare at your closet and wonder why fashion designers aren’t creating the clothes you really want? Talking about it on social media might just be the answer. According to new research from the University of Missouri, social media hashtags could be the tool fashion designers use to forecast trends in the industry to better...
Software- and computer-based works of art are fragile–not unlike their canvas counterparts–as their underlying technologies such as operating systems and programming languages change rapidly, placing these works at risk. These include Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon (1998-99), Mark Napier’s net.flag (2002), and John F. Simon Jr.’s Unfolding Object (2002), three online works recently conserved at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, through a...
On February 16, the Art Institute of Chicago announced the results of significant new research on five terracotta sculptures–so named Bankoni after a village in present-day Mali where they were found. The objects date from between the 12th and 15th centuries. This places them “among the oldest surviving sculptures from sub-Saharan Africa and among the...
Even Georgia O’Keeffe noticed the pin-sized blisters bubbling on the surface of her paintings. For decades, conservationists and scholars assumed these tiny protrusions were grains of sand, kicked up from the New Mexico desert where O’Keeffe lived and worked. But as the protrusions began to grow, spread and eventually flake off, people shifted from curious...
Popular music has changed over the years, and the music of 2019 is noticeably different from the music of the 1960s or 1970s. But it is not just the music that changed, but also the lyrics. Data scientists at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan used quantitative analytics to study the change in lyrics of popular...
In science, the “Mona Lisa Effect” refers to the impression that the eyes of the person portrayed in an image seem to follow the viewer as they move in front of the picture. Two researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) at Bielefeld University demonstrate that, ironically enough, this effect does not...
Millionaire rapper Shawn Carter, aka Jay-Z, has proved yet again why he is larger than life. He is embroiled in a contractual dispute over the US$204m (£159m) sale of his clothing brand to Iconix Brand Group a decade ago. In a twist that has now thrown the world of arbitration into a frenzy, Jay-Z recently...
Putting on clothes is a daily, mundane task that most of us perform with little or no thought. We may never take into consideration the multiple steps and physical motions involved when we’re getting dressed in the mornings. But that is precisely what needs to be explored when attempting to capture the motion of dressing...
