Curating art exhibitions using machine learning

Art curatorship has always been mostly the subjective work of human experts, who, with extensive knowledge of many and diverse artworks, select a few of those to present in communal spaces, spaces that evolved into what we now call art galleries. There are no hard and fast set of rules on how to select these artworks, given a theme which either is presented to the art curator or constructed by her/him. Here we present a series of artificial models -- a total of four related models -- based on machine learning techniques (a subset of artificial intelligence) that attempt to learn from existing exhibitions which have been curated by human experts, in order to be able to do similar curatorship work. We focus exclusively on the last 25 years of past exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, due to the quality of the data available and the physical and time limitations of our research. Our four artificial intelligence models achieve a reasonable ability at imitating these various curators responsible for all those exhibitions, with various degrees of precision and curatorial coherence. In particular, we can conclude two key insights: first, that there is sufficient information in these exhibitions to construct an artificial intelligence model that replicates past exhibitions with an accuracy well above random choices; second, that using feature engineering and carefully designing the architecture of modest size models can make them as good as those using the so-called large language models such as GPT in a brute force approach. We also believe, based on small attempts to use the models in out-of-sample experiments, that given more much more data, it should be possible for these kinds of artificial intelligence agents to be closer and closer to the aesthetic and curatorial judgment of human art curators.