Numbers in the Dark? Quantitative Aesthetics and the Future(s) of Art / History

Surveying the cultural landscape in early 2023, art critic Ben Davis pondered the “increasing popularity of...Quantitative Aesthetics—the way numbers function more and more as a proxy for artistic value” (Davis 2023). While that relationship has long held in the art market as both common sense and critical complaint, comparative metrics like box office returns and music platform streams increasingly inform the way we talk and think about culture, transforming understandings of aesthetic taste and cultural value. To explore this phenomenon in more depth, this panel gathers perspectives on how quantification and computation are shaping the production, reception, and study of art in our “ordinal society, a society oriented toward, justified by, and governed through measurement” (Fourcade and Healy 2024). How, for example, do measurement and quantification condition art-making, artists’ identities and careers, arts organizations’ operations, and audiences’ behavior? What epistemological commitments and risks (cf., Clayton 2021, Lindsay 2021) are shared by digital and data-driven art history (e.g., Brown 2020, Greenwald 2021), as well as computational aesthetics (Lakhal, et al. 2020) and neuroaesthetics (e.g., Magsamen and Ross 2023)? What does the rise of quantitative aesthetics and ordinal society mean for the future of art and art history?