Using AI to Determine Whether Figurative or Abstract Art is More Popular Today

While homo sapiens were capable of abstract thought almost 100,000 years ago, it took much longer for the human mind to invent abstract painting. It wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Hilma af Klint created abstract works with no identifiable references to the physical world. Abstraction quickly became the lodestar driving artistic production, a trend that largely continues to this day. But just how popular is abstract art with collectors and art enthusiasts? To try and answer this question, we assembled a database of 112,600 Instagram posts made last December for which the geolocation and/or hashtags indicated that the user was in Miami during Art Basel in Miami Beach. Eliminating selfies and other extraneous pictures yielded approximately 74,760 images, which represents the collective visual record of all the artworks Instagram users saw in person that they also elected to share with their followers.