Formation of an art concept: A case study using quantitative analysis of a contemporary artist's interview data

The process of formation by an artist of an art concept for the production of a new series of artwork has not yet been empirically elucidated. The goal of this study is to describe the process of art concept formation by a contemporary artist through quantitative analyses of a text corpus based on interviews with the artist. From an analysis of the frequency of occurrence of items of vocabulary in the interview data and the TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency), we find that the second of three phases in the artist's creative process was the most critical for the formation of the art concept, as also shown in our previous qualitative study. Further, based on an analysis of co-occurrence frequencies of words, the structure of the art concept is deduced from the importance of co-occurring vocabulary. By means of visualizing the network of co-occurrence analysis, it is clarified that the feature words "The Large Glass" functioned in the first phase as the medium for dividing the structure of the concept into two parts. In the second phase, these two parts of the structure became integrated into one. In the last phase, the structure of the concept was elaborated on with the revived feature words, "White Noise" and "Duchamp".