How to model artistic movement?

[stephenhart8]

For the moment in the v1.5 of the Target Model, movement are modeled as types on an actor, meaning that he is linked to that movement. Movement are particularly important in Art History, and would maybe need to be better described, like with date associated to them. But is it the role of Makers (or Artefact) Canada to describe artistic movement? If we want to, having artistic movement as E5 Event could work, with the actors participating in the event (p11 had participant). The event of movement could then have more metadata like dates, places, etc.

[KarineLeonardBrouillet]

To me, the potential to have more metadata is quite enticing as it can help validate or infer more data pertaining to actors, or disambiguate between two movements that have a very similar, or identical even, name. For example, having metadata would make it easier to distinguish between Ludites (a people mentioned in the Hebrew Bible) and Luddites (a 19th-century oath-based organization). Naturalism could be a more fitting example as it is a movement in a number of disciplines (literature, visual arts, theatre, philosophy, sociology, etc.), with each movement having vastly different outlooks and sets of references.

[Habennin]

If you want to talk about a strict group of people then E74, otherwise E4 is standard for periods. If you want to associate people however, yes you need to go down to E5.

[stephenhart8]

For Movements that are not groups, I propose the following pattern:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tMWrFoaGlNpe5_W2Jbp0jR12Crgqr3HZ

The P9 consists of -> E5 is to render supra movement like Naturalism, that contains other movements like Literary Naturalism, etc.

Any comments?

[VladimirAlexiev]

I like the modeling of Movement as Period (or Event). Then you can state an object belongs to that movement by saying its Production is P9 part of the movement (or P10 included in the movement, which is a weaker statement).

However, for some other kinds of "denominations" (culture, religion, art collective, circle, workshop...) you have to use Group, so you can say that an object of which you don't know an individual creator was made by that group.

Eg ULAN has a whole facet including "unknown Canadian", "unknown Egyptian" etc. We modeled those as groups.

[illip]

Hi all,

I think we all agree that E5_Event seems to be the ideal candidate for modeling artistic movements. CHIN will examine this option in the next version of the TM.

As @VladimirAlexiev said, some denominations will be modeled using "group belonging" pattern. There is a similar discussion in issue #27. I still think we need to clearly identify when we should be using the "group belonging" pattern.

I'm not sure if it's the right place to discuss the "unknown Canadians" case, but I don't think they should be model as groups since they don't collectively perform something.

[VladimirAlexiev]

@stephenhart8 About the P11 link in your diagram: I think it'll need some complication in order to state more specifically the belonging of an artist to a movement:

• was he a founder, or a "regular member" of that movement (ok, maybe this question is a bit naive from an art history point of view; but clearly the relation of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to Cubism is stronger than the relation of other artists to the same movement)
• When (during which period)
• Where (place) is applicable in some cases

So maybe both P11, and a sub-node eg "Picasso's Cubism Period" that is P9 of the overall movement "Cubism"

[KarineLeonardBrouillet]

I would argue that a movement differs from an artist group. Unlike a group, a movement is generally not something artists join, it is a historical assessment made by experts to cohere artists according to common stylistic practices. As such, a "founder" of the movement would be the art historian or expert cohering these artists, not the artists participating in the movement (and I doubt such a "founder" would be recorded in museum data or that it would be a level of detail we would account for in the first stages of the model as it stands). So the same data can be recorded in both group and movement, but do not mean the same thing. Artistic groups are not always also movements and vice versa.

"clearly the relation of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to Cubism is stronger than the relation of other artists to the same movement"

I would again disagree: they might have been more prominent members, but we are not modelling prominence here. They might be more influential figures when it comes to the movement, but this kind of influence could be modelled using P15_was_influenced_by. Even if an institution decided to record them as founders of the Cubists, this would be of the Cubists as a group (a congregation of artists who ascribe to common principles), not as a movement (Cubism).

“Picasso's Cubism Period”

Picasso had a cubist (style) period, but he did not have a cubism (movement) period I would argue. Even accepting that having a movement as a period is possible, this would once again be an art historical conclusion rather than an artistic choice on the part of the practitioner. So a movement's period would be the interval in time that art historians broadly associate with the movement, not with an artist making stylistic choices that align with it (this would be style). The same would apply for the place I would say: it would pertain to the movement's geographical positioning, not the practitioner's who is a participant remotely (temporally or intellectually, i.e. from a historical or theoretical standpoint).

All this to say that inferring information on artists' practice from movements would have to be examined much more closely I think :)