Artistic Progress, the Case of Films

It was once common to talk of the history of art in terms of progress and, for all I know, it may still be [Arthur Danto said that in a paper, but I've lost the citation.]. Here's a paper about cumulative evolution in the film industry. It's an open question whether or not this cumulative process comes with aesthetic improvement.

Finding 2: Film crews increase through accumulation of innovations in film production. A: diffusion curves of jobs that originate in each decade. B: Maintenance of jobs by decade. Blue dots - maintained jobs. Red dots - not maintained ones. This resembles the “ratchet effect” /4 pic.twitter.com/AO60uJl5X8 — Oleg Sobchuk (@oleg_sobchuk) June 17, 2020

Finding 4: The exponential growth can be explained by the increase of “innovation space”: the space of possible combinations of job components, which is expanding over time. Figure: the discovery of jobs in the thematic cluster of ‘director’ in the top 100 films /6 pic.twitter.com/zDCm9LOVv3 — Oleg Sobchuk (@oleg_sobchuk) June 17, 2020

Tinits, P., & Sobchuk, O. (2020). Open-ended cumulative cultural evolution of Hollywood film crews. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2, E26. doi:10.1017/ehs.2020.21

Are there large-scale trends in art history that surpass individual creativity or relatively short artistic movements? Many theories describe art history as a process similar to a change of fashions, while others suggest that art can be progressive – getting better, in some sense, over time. We approach this question anew with the theory of cumulative cultural evolution, which describes cultural accomplishments in terms of innovations that are maintained across generations and accumulated to support ever greater creative potential. In this paper, we empirically test the possibility for cumulative evolution in the techniques used to make an artistic product. Specifically, we measure the size and structure of the production crews in American films in 1910–2010 based on a dataset of 1000 popular films across the century. We find that film crews become exponentially more complex, with a growing set of core jobs, and more innovative in creating new jobs in filmmaking. Our study shows that art history can be cumulative, showing the progressive maintenance of innovative techniques, and thus providing an alternative to the widespread view of art history as a mere fluctuation of trends and fashions.