Figure 2

Aesthetic dynamics over 500 years in the Historical dataset 1500 to 2000 (left, (A) & (B)), and over the first 175 days of the contemporary NFT art market Hic et Nunc from March 2021 (C), (D). Each dot is an artwork, reduced to a pixel. The vertical axes are values of the first principal components of a joint PCA, interpretable through the transformations that load onto them (see text for details). The axes of (A)-(C) and (B)-(D) are comparable, but the displayed ranges differ to save space: Historical is constrained to a much smaller area in the aesthetic complexity space (note black side brackets). The trend lines correspond to the median (black) and quartiles (dark gray); 95% of the data lies between the outer light gray lines. The heatmap insets (E), (F) indicate areas of the complexity space conductive to NFT sales (as a percentage, from 0 sales blue, to 100% sold if dark red in a given bin). (G) shows typical NFTs sold on the Hic et Nunc marketplace, as images closest to the median (across all PCs) for each day. Various avatar or portrait series eventually rise to be among the most commonly minted objects — visible as tight colorful groupings at low complexity in PC1 — but not all such series are successful, as indicated by the blue areas in the corresponding inset panels. This example demonstrates how the same method can be used to make sense of both very long and very short timescales, in art history and contemporary art