Museum of One - Spatiotemporal Art Comparison Tool
This is a Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) framework for analyzing and comparing artwork across different geographical locations and time periods. The app serves as an independent arts research tool designed to challenge traditional art criticism by asking "Under what conditions did this work become inevitable?" rather than "What does this work mean?"
Key Features:
- Spatiotemporal Correlation: Allows users to select two distinct geographical locations and a shared timeframe to isolate the "conditions of emergence" that shaped artistic production in different places
- Comparative Synthesis: Identifies shared pressures like globalization and divergent local conditions such as specific state policies or economic systems
- Archival Grounding: Directly retrieves and displays linked records from the Google Arts & Culture (GAC) database to ensure transparency and verifiable research
Methodology:
The tool uses the Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC) framework operating on three foundational axioms:
- Conditions over Intent - The artist's personal intentions are secondary to institutional, economic, and political pressures
- Probabilistic Logic - Analysis identifies what context made statistically more likely rather than declaring facts
- Custodial Silence - When data is missing or inaccessible, the system refuses to speculate, maintaining "custodial silence"
This is essentially a diagnostic interface that treats artwork as nodes within larger structural fields, moving away from subjective interpretation toward systematic analysis of the conditions that made certain artistic movements inevitable.