Which are brighter? Which is more colorful? Which are paler? No one can say why directly and very precisely. But from a subjective perspective, these works can all give people intuitive pleasure. To get a more convincing comparison, explore the trend of color application in NFT artworks. We decided to let the data speak.
Does NFT art creation have aesthetic and artistic value? We digitally analyze the visual dimension of NFT art creation and compare it with traditional European painting. We want to explore the differences between NFT art creation and traditional Impressionism and Neoclassicism paintings in terms of color.
Obtaining images of the Impressionism and Neoclassicism collections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art API. Crawling the art and profile images (PFP) from Opensea for 350 works in 7 collections. Uniformly converted multiple image formats and used computer vision algorithms to convert them into 3D RGB arrays for calculation.
Three dimensions of color
- Colorfulness+
The richness of the use of color. (Higher value, more colorful) - Saturation+
Saturation measures the vividness and intensity of colors in an image. (Higher value, more vividly) - Brightness+
Brightness refers to the overall lightness or darkness of an image, measured by the average mean color value of all pixels in the image. (Higher value, more brighter)
What about the brightness?
compare NFT artworks with traditional paintings
Compare with traditional artworks including impressionism and neoclassicism paintings, it can be seen that the NFT collections has an overall lower brightness, the potential explanation includes:
Traditional artworks might emphasize more on the observation and reproduction of nature and reality, and pursuing exquisite expressive effects, and thus often use higher brightness to express transparent or smooth materials. While NFT works are often more emotionally and experientially oriented and be more inclined to use lower brightness to convey a softer or mysterious atmosphere.
In addition, NFT artworks and traditional artworks may differ due to the display medium. Specifically, NFT artworks are typically in digital form, while traditional artworks may use physical media such as oil paints and watercolors. The characteristics of these media may affect the brightness representation of the image.
What about the colorfulness and saturation?
For the comparison of saturation and colorfulness, in this chart it can be seen that the dots representing traditional art fall in a very closed region, while the dots representing NFT artworks are more widely distributed. This could be due to the advantages of digital media, artist intention, and audience’s aesthetic needs:
NFT artworks are typically in digital form, allowing artists to create their works using tools such as computers and tablets, which enables more precise and complex color adjustments, as well as easy saving and sharing of their works. In contrast, traditional artworks may be limited by physical media and tools, such as the thickness and drying speed of oil paints, making color adjustments and saving more cumbersome.
NFT artists may be more inclined to use rich colors and saturation to express their creative intent and highlight the features of digital media. Furthermore, NFT artworks are typically exhibited and sold on digital platforms, requiring artists to attract viewers’ attention with richer colors and saturation to enhance the visual impact of their works. However, traditional artists may pay more attention to observing and depicting light and objects, and their use of color and saturation may be more limited, with more emphasis on form and structure.
Do color and saturation have relate with price?
When crawling the urls of different pictures from the NFT website, the prizes of each picture are also collected and thus can explore if there is a correlation between the price and color. In the scatterplot below, 6 NFT collection of 300 artworks are divided into two groups, one for the higher priced parts of each collection, and the other for the lower priced ones.
Through this image it can be seen that the colorfulness and saturation distribution of the two groups is very similar, indicating that price and color do not have a very significant relationship, the prize of NFT artwork maybe more likely to be related to the artist or the context in which the work was created. The third part of this project is trying to analyze if the rarity of each artwork, decided by a set of criteria, is correlate with their price.