Verification of Pollack's art with fractals

Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon reported 8-years ago that he found Jackson Pollack's artwork to have fractal qualities. Not that they are a fractal, because fractals have detail at all scales of magnification. So, some people wanted to use Taylor's approach to verify found paintings as original Pollack artwork.

Well, a graduate student at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Katherine Jones-Smith

made some doodles on a page—"pretty ugly" ones, she says—she found that they shared the qualities of a Pollock, according to an analysis that follows Taylor's approach. "Either Taylor is wrong, or Kate's drawings are worth $40 million," says Jones-Smith's collaborator Harsh Mathur. "We'd be happy either way."

This started a discussion as to whether Taylor's approach can actually verify artwork.

Frankly, fractals are a mess when you try to define them because so many objects that you would like to be fractals don't fit in a single definition.

I think Michael Barnsley says it best:

For authentication, it doesn't matter whether it's legitimate to call Pollock paintings fractal, says Michael Barnsley of Australian National University in Canberra. Taylor has a reproducible technique that produces numbers from a painting, and he can correlate those numbers with different artists. "That doesn't allow you to authenticate or not authenticate a painting, but you could certainly add it into the collection of information that you have to say that it's more likely," he says.

Fractals are ill-defined now but the methods we use to measure fractal dimension have a place in our mathematical toolbox. A place, among many other tools, but not the only tool.