Fabulous Hitmontop

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: What characteristics do important artworks share?

The value and importance of an artwork is a subjective interpretation varying across individuals. To explore how the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City classifies “important” and “unimportant” artworks, we performed a data analysis project containing two sub-topics to explore factors associated with an artwork being “highlighted” by the museum. The analysis utilizes three variables within the data set (`is_highlight`, `object_end_date`, `is_timeline_work`) and one that we mutated: `finished_recently`. The first analysis aims to find the association between the year an artwork is completed and whether it is highlighted by the museum. A difference in proportion test (two-sided) is performed. The second analysis aims to find the association between whether an artwork is highlighted and whether it appears on the Art History Timeline website of the MET museum. A one-sided difference in proportion test is performed. For both of the analysis, hypothesis tests that generates a p-value are used, giving us significant results for either.

We concluded that there is sufficient evidence to justify that the proportion of highlighted artworks completed before 1650 (pre-Renaissance) is different from the proportion of highlighted artworks completed after 1650 (post-Renaissance). There is also sufficient evidence to prove that the proportion of highlighted artworks on the art history timeline website is higher than the proportion of highlighted artworks not on the art history timeline website.