The internet and personal computers changed the world. Did they have an impact on the make up of art collections?
To answer this question we decided to look at two collections: MoMA, representing the more traditional art world, and Rhizome, a younger, smaller collection dedicated to net art, the kind of work made possible by the internet and personal computers.
MoMA's collection features different periods and movements, mainly focused on the 19th and 20th century. Rhizome is only focused on digital-born art and culture and spans the past 40 years.
The size difference of the datasets is a problem though!
What can we do about it? π€
Moma Artworks
Rhizome Artworks
We decided that we would try and align the two collections by looking at key dates: first time an artwork was created, and the first time it was acquired.
MoMA (Sampled) artworks
Rhizome artworks
MoMA (Sampled) artists
Rhizome artists
With this approach, Rhizome's collection is now 10% of MoMA's and its total artists are 35% π
So how can we answer our research question? Well there are two primary variables in our data - gender and nationality - so let's use these as lenses for investigation π
All the visualisations on this website have interactive elements, so feel free to play around with them - be wary though they're iframes, a limitation of the library we used, and iframes are evil. We're sorry ππ»
Who Makes It Into Art Collections?
Gender is the first filter through which we can get an understanding of whether or not collections have changed since the internet and personal computers entered our lives.
But gender is not just a binary! Artists often work together as collectives or through collaborations and institutions sometimes choose to exhibit work from different artists together under a theme. This simple act of coming together gives us another dimension to break away from the dominance of the male/female binary.
π΄ How Many Men? π΄
We can see that MoMA has a lower percentage of men (yay!) but Rhizome has more women in its collection, while collectives are almost a quarter of the collection for MoMA. In both institutions, artists outside of the male/female binary remain widely underrepresented.
Collectives and collaborations on their own can still hide some imbalances though. What do the genders inside these groups look like? π€
π§βπ€βπ§ Who Takes Part in Collectives & Collaborations? π§βπ€βπ§
MoMA features primarily male collectives and collaborations, while Rhizome has more mixed gender collectives. However, MoMA has one collective/collaboration that includes a non-binary artist (hover on the side of mixed gender child!).
So what happens if we look at the MoMA dataset in full, but using 1983 - the year that the TCP/IP protocol became widely available as well as the year that Rhizome's first artwork was created - as a pivot date?
π» Did the Internet Help? π»
Before the internet MoMA's collection is almost three quarter males. After 1983 the MoMA collection appears to be rebalancing in gender representation with double the percentage of women and collaborations, and the appearance of the first non binary artists.
Ok, so maybe there was a change? But! MoMA catalogues its artwork under 8 different departments and they're not all related to computers and the internet. What happens if we select four departments that are more closely aligned to net art: Photography, Media & Performance, Films, and Drawing & Print. π€
π» From Analogue to Digital π·
Three of the four departments show a difference in gender representation, with males decreasing and women increasing in Photography, Film, and Drawings & Prints. Media & Performance, which is most closely aligned with Rhizome's net art focus, more than doubles in overall size (from 245 to 579) with more men, women, and collaborations as well as the only three artists who identify as non-binary in the entire MoMA collection.
Unfortunately, Rhizome doesn't have any department info π So we used the text available on the website - including artist statements and descriptions written by the institution - to allocate artworks to equivalent departments based on keyword searches. The result is three overall departments for both institutions that capture the various types of artworks we're most interested in:
π· Still Images - incorporating MoMA's Photography and Drawings & Prints departments
π₯ Moving Images - covering MoMA's Film department
π Media and Performance - covering Rhizome's Net Art focus
πͺ Departmental Showdown π₯
With this new departmental split we can see that one of the main differences between these two collections is the preminence of Still Images acquisitions in MoMA while Rhizome seems to be acquiring artworks more evenly across genders and departments.
π°οΈ Time is on our side? π°οΈ
But wait!!! What about time? Can it tell us anything else about gender? What if we look at when an artwork is acquired, based on when it was created?
Well, well, well... We can see that Rhizome appeared to peak in 2007 where it was acquiring the most artworks that were created the same year, but then its acquisitions slow down in the following decade before picking up again in recent years. MoMA on the other hand, and unsurprisingly being a bigger institution with more funding and money, acquires more evenly over the past 20 years though it also had a peak in 2005.
The obvious assumption here is that the economic crash of the late 2000s, which began in 2007 and fully erupted everywhere in 2008, most likely led to a slow down in acquisition at Rhizome due to a lack of money.
Observation Time π
The internet revolution didn't change centuries of gender imbalance by itself but it certainly seems fair to assume that it has been one of the contributing factors towards a gender rebalancing in art collections between men and women. However the representation of non-binary people remains an issue with only three artists in MoMA's collection (out of more than 3,000) and one in Rhizome (out of more than 1,200).
Where Do Artists Come From?
After gender, nationality of artists is the next π through which we can try and observe how the internet and personal computers might have changed the make up of art collections.
And just as gender is dominated by a binary, so is the concept of nationality dominated by the division between Global North and South*, which splits countries along socio-economic and political characteristics.
* We based our classifying of countries as belonging to the Global North or South on Wikimedia's list.
π Mirror, Mirror on the Wall π
Just as we might expect to see many men in the gender representation of collections, we can see at a glance an over representation of artists from Global North countries such as the United States (the most prominent country in both collections), the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. The specter of colonialism still hangs strong over art collections even if they're digital born.
This said, there does seem to be quite a wide representation of nationalities overall, so perhaps using the Global North/South divide concept, we can take a closer look at artists from the Global South?
π©π΄ Southern Pride π§π·
Out of the 78 countries* in the Global South, 47 are represented across both collections. More interesting is that the majority of these countries appear to come from the Latin/South America region. Perhaps, the promixity of both institutions to Latin America might explain their preference for artists from the region.
Just as the internet didn't fix gender imbalance, it also hasn't necessarily allowed artists from the Global South more access to art institutions in the Global North. The divide isn't just geo-political, it's also digital: who gets access to the new tools of art production.
* This count is based on the United Nations' Finance Center for South-South Cooperation's list.
Observation Time π
One of the most interesting observations we came to while working on nationalities is how certain artists might belong to a nation, or people, that no longer exists or has never been given a nation of its own. Both collections feature artworks from Yugoslav artists, who are still identified as such in the MoMA datasets, and who today would be classified as belonging to any of the nations that emerged from the break up of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, Native American artists do not have a nation to call their own and must be represented under the flag of the nation that conquered them π’
π¦SPOTLIGHT
π«₯Invisible nationalities
Who, Where, What, When?
Now that we've looked gender and nationality, and taken a dip into time, let's combine them all together! π§ͺ
We'll keep our focus on artists from the Global South and start with a look at which nationalities and gender are associated with which department (remember we have three: Still Images π·, Moving Images π₯, and Media and Performance π).
3οΈβ£ Three Is The Magic Number 3οΈβ£
One of the insights we gathered from this combination was the presence of female artists from the Middle east and Arab States within Media and Performance. In the case of Rhizome, out of six artists from the Middle east, five were women with artworks in the field, while in MoMA it was 6 out of 17 and another 3 from Arab States, out of 5. On the flipside, this approach also shows the prevalence of male artists from South/Latin America, Asia & Pacific, and Africa in MoMA's Still Images departments.
π° Who Buys Who? π°
Just as we used the time variable in our dataset to look at when artworks were acquired based on their creation earlier, we decided to take a look at when artworks from artists from the Global South get acquired.
Observation Time π
Combining three variables like this can ultimately lead to more confusion than clarity. While looking at nationalities, gender, and departments shone some light on female artists from the Middle east and Arab States, adding the time variable doesn't seem to reveal more than it did earlier. As they say: Keep It Simple Stupid.
π¦ SPOTLIGHT π Media & Performance artworks by female artists from the Global South
Words Are Fun!
Having complicated things with our last attempt at three variables in one, we decided that it might be best to ease our way into a conclusion by taking a look at words. A simple and trustworthy variable π€
Text for both collections was taken from available descriptions, in the case of MoMA only 2,880 artworks had an available text description online, all written by the institution. For Rhizome, the text descriptions sometimes included both artist statements and institution descriptions. We then extracted the most popular keywords from the text associated with each artwork and counted their occurences, before selecting those that occured at least 100 times.
You can use the treemap below to explore the results! π
Final Observation π
Both collections share the top keywords of 'work' and 'art', which is to be expected π More interestingly, 5% of MoMA's keywords is 'made' while 5% of Rhizome's is 'new'. We can also clearly see the focus on net art and digital-born culture in Rhizome with 'html', 'video', 'internet', and 'interactive' in the top occuring keywords, while MoMA's keywords again bring to the fore the size of its Still Images departments as well the themes of space and war. Having looked at the most prominent keywords, we then decided to take a look at some of the themes occuring within the work of female artists from the Global South as a way to leave you, the reader, with some food for thought.
