India, Sept. 6 -- The real aesthete can spend hours in front of a painting in an art gallery and wax eloquent on the intended message and context. What if somebody trained a computer programme to look at 630,000 paintings from 1400 onwards and told a story of what influenced the artists and their art when they were produced?

A June 2025 research paper by economists (and perhaps also aesthetes) Clement Gorin, Stephan Heblich and Yanos Zylberberg has done exactly that. It classifies artworks by eight different emotions: four uplifting (awe, contentment, amusement and excitement) and four dark (fear, sadness, anger and disgust), and then tries to find a larger relationship between art and social, political, economic and even ecological circ...