...Lior Shamir, a computer scientist at Lawrence Technological University, has taken a series of image analysis algorithms and shown that they can discriminate between real Pollocks and pieces painted in an attempt to mimic his style.
This isn’t the first time that computer science has intruded into the world of fine art. In several cases in the past, it has done so via the art community’s invitation, as scientific analysis can help determine whether a suspicious work is likely to be genuine or not. Since Pollock painted very recently, however, it’s relatively easy for a forger to match his materials. Whether they match his style or not is debatable given the disagreements noted above about whether there’s a distinctive style involved at all.
There are, however, a number of possible Pollocks that are, as Shamir puts it, of “controversial authenticity,” and computer scientists have attempted to use image analysis to weigh in on the issue. The idea that an artist paints in ways that create a distinctive style that’s possible to identify based on multiple paintings isn’t at all controversial. The question is whether that style can be reduced to a value through the mathematical processing of the information in an image of those paintings. In Pollock’s case, past attempts indicated that his paintings have a distinctive fractal nature that can be recognized by algorithms...
