Cultural evolution – of the arts

In this paper, we chart an emerging academic terrain: cultural evolution of the arts, which is a theory-driven exploration of artistic dynamics, often done with large datasets of music, literature, movies, paintings, or games. This field has grown at the intersection of cultural evolution theory and several academic fields: computational humanities, anthropology, network science, and others, and poses interesting challenges for each of them. What constitutes artistic transmission in the first place? Is it possible to find recurring patterns in artistic history – and how much data is needed for that? What makes the evolution of the arts different from the evolution of other forms of knowledge? We discuss all these problems in this paper. Additionally, we perform a bibliometric analysis of this field and explore a co-citation network of the works on artistic evolution. Finally, we highlight major challenges for this field in the future, as the arts are rapidly evolving in the digital age.