Structural Aspects of Visual Art Design and Their Relation to Broader Sociocultural Contexts

Abstract

This article outlines the results of a research project focused on certain cross-cultural consistencies in the visual arts and the implications of these for our understanding of art's broader sociocultural and historical contexts. The consistencies examined were for the most part structural, involving design and composition. The resulting data were used to construct a new model categorizing art styles typologically; i.e., according to specified structural features in their design behaviors and repertoires. Sorting criteria were broad enough to classify all art styles yet specific enough to strictly define categories and to be predictive for feature complexes in particular styles. The taxonomy resulting from art style categorization by design-structure corresponded to previous style groupings assembled according to art function and sociocultural context, but appeared to be more precise and quantifiable. Evidence suggested that the structural features defining such art style classes can also typologically categorize cultures. The array of classes and class memberships resulting from trial cultural sortings by these features corresponded to those produced by structurally typing art styles according to the same features. That is, the structural distinctions defining the art style classes turned out to be particular examples of a pattern actually organizing phenomena at levels much broader or more basic than the visual arts. In this article, the issues giving rise to a new model, the model itself, and an accompanying theory accounting for the model are briefly presented. The data assemblage involved is also described, though for reasons of space not actually included, in this article. Representative data samplings and detailed discussions of conclusions and models deriving from the data are presented in a forthcoming book (Visual Art Design Structures and Their Sociocultural Contexts).