ARTchivist's Notebook: Artle, or Art Without Metadata
Like lots of people, I've been playing Artle, the new Wordle-esque game from the National Gallery of Art. Each day brings a new challenge, in the form of an artwork drawn from the museum's collections. The image is stripped of any identifying information, and you have four tries to guess the artist. Each wrong guess unveils another piece by the same artist, providing more grist for art historical muscle memory. Like Wordle, it's a tiny dopamine roller coaster, as one's pride dips with each failed attempt, and exalts with each correct identification.
In the above example, it took me three tries to identify the titan Titian (clearly the Italian Renaissance is not my forté), and it was only because the third image was of a work I already knew to be his, Venus and Adonis. Without such familiarity, I felt strangely adrift, and it made me reflect on the reassuring cocoon of metadata that museums typically provide: title, date, medium, country of origin, etc. Without these moorings, we are left to rely on our own memories, or something even more wispy, which I'll call "feel."
"Feel" is like the quality Malcolm Gladwell identifies in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. He describes how certain experts are able to make snap judgments that turn out to be correct, not because they did extensive research on the particular question at hand, but because they can draw upon accumulated experience that has become second nature. One recent Artle, a painting I had never seen before, just struck me as "Rembrandt-y," and low and behold, it was! (Pats self on back.) I was less sure about another, by Jean Dubuffet, but that guess also paid off. In this case, Artle actually expanded my knowledge of an artist with whom I had only a glancing acquaintance.
(I will admit to completely flubbing two recent Artles featuring Lee Krasner and Sam Gilliam, both of whom I should be more familiar with. And of course, knowing that the works come from the National Gallery of Art is a kind of metadata in itself, narrowing one's choices down to the upper crust of the art establishment.)
But aside from providing an occasion to brag about my art historical chops (or lack thereof), Artle underscores the importance and the democratizing impact of metadata. Without it, we are left with only our own knowledge, or the vagaries of feeling to fall back on. Either we know exactly what we're looking at, or we might: "This thing kind of looks like this other thing, but who knows if they are actually related?" I hope I may be forgiven for thinking this first image might be by Charles White:
This mushiness is fine, even fun, when we're playing a game. But it also harks back to the olden days, when art was the property and province of aristocrats, who hung their treasured works in eccentric, salon-style arrangements for their own pleasure, without didactics or other guides. To make sense of art, one had to already be "in the know." Museums are now the keepers and arbiters of our cultural heritage, and although they are beholden to the upper classes, at least they provide some guides and signposts the rest of us can understand.
Artle is fun for me because I have spent some time looking at and learning about art, but by separating artworks from their stories, their context, their metadata, it does raise the specter of privilege and opacity that make the art world seem elite and out of touch. It underscored for me how metadata is more important than ever, not only to find works you already know, but to learn more about those that you might.
Other things you "might" be interested in
What We Learn From Each Other: SAA's Cohort Mentoring Program
Keep an eye out for our roundtable discussion on mentoring archivists from diverse communities at the Society of American Archivist's Annual General Meeting in Boston on October 27. I'll be discussing SAA's pilot mentoring cohort program with my venerable colleagues: Jessica Chapel, Harvard Law School Library; Michelle Ganz, Dominican Sisters of Peace; Brenda Gunn, University of Virginia Library; Mario Ramirez, California State University; Renae Rapp, Suny Maritime College.
2022 International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums
Just learned about the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM), and this conference coming up in October 25-27. Although I haven't worked for a tribal heritage organization, I'm thinking of attending just to listen and learn.
Reparative Description at Society of American Archivists
The Reparative Description course I'm team-teaching on June 8 with Stephanie Luke is sold out (!) but will be available as a recording soon after. I hope you'll check it out!
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about this issue, please feel free to get in touch. Or follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter @SharonMizota.
ARTchivist's Notebook is an occasional newsletter musing on the intersection of archives, art, and social justice by me, Sharon Mizota, DEI metadata consultant and art writer.
I help museums, archives, libraries, and websites transform and share their metadata to achieve greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. Contact me to discuss your metadata project today.