Don't Measure - Appreciate! NPR Seen Through the Prism of Art History

Peter Hall, Ann-Sophie Lehmann

Abstract: Non-Photorealistic Rendering is now an established discipline, yet the question of how to evaluate ‘artistic’ NPR output is often raised. The question is most acute when the NPR algorithms are fully automatic, because then the output has no human involvement other than authorship of code. This paper addresses the question how can we assess the value of automatically produced NPR that has no purpose other than to be art? We doubt there is any single objective answer to this important question. We argue that experiments are at best difficult to design, and even the Turing test is of limited value because we are not asking whether a piece has been produced by a human but whether it possesses artistic merit regardless of its source. We conclude by suggesting that to assess progress in NPR, one must adopt an art historical perspective and appreciate it both for itself in its own terms, and within a wider cultural context.