

A/B Testing Art – Why Mondrian Was a Great Optimizer - fab1an
http://blog.eyequant.com/2013/01/18/ab-testing-art-part-i-why-mondrian-was-a-great-optimizer/

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mohamedzahid
If you're in New York, the Met currently has an exhibit on Matisse's process
of making multiple versions of the same painting: classic A/B tester :)

[http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/matisse?u...](http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/matisse?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=matisse)

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cpeterso
Artists Komar and Melamid created a 1995 project called "Most Wanted and Least
Wanted Paintings" paintings (and, in another project, songs) based on their
surveys of artistic preferences vary from different countries.

Their paintings "reflect the artists' interpretation of a professional market
research survey about aesthetic preferences and taste in painting. Intending
to discover what a true "people's art" would look like, the artists ...
expanded their market research to more than a dozen countries around the globe
and in turn, created Most Wanted and Least Wanted paintings for each country."

Curiously, Holland's most and least wanted preferences are nearly the reverse
of the other countries!

* The paintings: <http://awp.diaart.org/km/painting.html> (The United States' Most Wanted Painting's thumbnail is broken, but the linked picture works.)

* The survey data: <http://awp.diaart.org/km/surveyresults.html>

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stephth
Nice read, thanks! It made me more hungry to learn about artistic processes.

I have to say though, as a plug to a service that helps improve your website
presentation and flow, in the context of that blog page, to me it's a big turn
off. They talk about a master of visual flow, and then present it in that
visual mess of a blog. A link to the .com can't even be found around the top
left and instead must be dug up from a cloud of menus on the right, basic
visual hierarchy point (point that actually makes a short appearance in the
actual article) that so many company blogs get wrong but you'd expect web
design experts to get right. I'm not saying their tech isn't good, I have no
idea, but I find it hard not to think that if it was good, they'd have figured
out how to use it to improve their own promotion site.

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stephth
I re-read myself and got uncomfortable with how negative my comment sounds.
Even though it sort of ended up sounding like I wrote it to be dismissive of
other's work, I didn't, I thought my experience would be useful to others as a
constructive point. Next time I should express myself with more tact.

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noelwelsh
I'm a bit conflicted about this post. It's very interesting, but it misuses
the term A/B testing.

More later, if I get time.

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noelwelsh
Here's more:

One of the key insights behind A/B testing is the realisation that it's only
what happens with real customers that counts. It doesn't matter what you like,
the CEO likes, or your dog likes -- if your customers don't like your latest
design/copy/whatever it doesn't count for sh*t. This is the opposite to what
the artists mentioned did -- mainly relying on their own judgement before
displaying a finished work to the public. The fact they were good at
consistently guessing what would be appreciated (let's leave aside defining
the metric of success for art) is a large part of what makes them a good
artist.

This is a moderately pedantic point, and shouldn't detract from what is to me
the most interesting point of the article -- that we can correlate "good" art
with objective measurements. A bunch of questions immediately arise:

Does this result generalise beyond Mondrian's work? His work is particularly
well suited to the type of experiment described. I imagine fiddling with a
hyper-realistic painting in a meaningful way would be harder. Are there
consistent similarities in gaze patterns between good art and bad art?

Can we generate a useful predictive model of eye movements? That is, given an
image can we predict where the eye will go?

Does this generalise to other domains, like effective landing pages? Could eye
movements be used to predict purchasing behaviour?

The latter two seem like the core assumptions that EyeQuant is built on. More
depth here would be good.

