Analysis on the evolutionary process of the artistic network

Abstract

Most of the artists are labeled as a particular art movement. Artists shared a tendency or style of art and learned from one another, and some artists often broke away from the group when they felt confined to a certain style. The artists who strayed and utilized their creativity in different ways became the forerunner and ran in the leading packs of inspiration. They introduced a new style for young inspiring artists and pushed art toward the new style of art. In this way, art movement has evolved by repeating the process between divergence and convergence—two of the most significant aspects of cultural creativity. More importantly, the artistic network is formed an intricate web of connection through their own artistic style. The styles of each artist regarded as the main indicator in investigating an intrinsic attribute of the network. In the creation and dissemination of artistic style, collaboration and the communication of new ideas play an essential role, which can be captured in the heterogeneous network of artists’ relationships. Meanwhile, recent network studies have recognized that networks evolve over time, whereas in the past both graph theory and social network analysis have tended to treat networks as static structures. The viewpoint aims to understand networks not just as topological objects, but also as the evolving dynamic structure. Hence, what is being recovered from network shapes that contains a past and future that of the network can explain the divergence or convergence of the network. This thesis thus suggested the development of new models to mimic the evolvement of a network and to define the dynamics which ultimately allows us to identify the network’s main arteries of innovation flow. For this purpose, I especially focused on the concept of extrema evolution law and process-grammar by Leyton. The extrema evolution laws express any history of shape evolution in terms of the progressive changes of extrema along that history. Note that two fundamentally important factors—continuation and bifurcation—are the main indicators in network evolution. For the first step to this purpose, the thesis dealt with the different stages of development in each national Impressionism. The fact that Impressionism took different forms in different countries is a settled opinion in art history. However, an important open question still remains: Why were some countries quickly to appreciate the Impressionists than other? How has this happened? Where did the difference originate? Herein, this thesis addressed these questions by examining the evolutionary process of network. In addition, this thesis dealt with Dansaekhwa and Abstract Expressionism that known as a spontaneous emergence. As a result, the thesis found that the evolution patterns of network can demonstrate and visualize the development of art movement. Throughout the holistic approach to art movements, this thesis thus analytically tracked the contribution of artists to the evolution of the network, exposed the dynamics that link structure and dynamic flow for intrinsic interpretation of network evolution.