MUMBAI: From Van Gogh to Lord of the Rings: Algorithms decode legendary ‘hot streaks’

MUMBAI: Ever
heard of the paintings The Potato Eaters, Bulb Fields and Lying Cow? What if I
told you they were crafted by the same artist who inspired The Starry Night mug
you picked up from a museum gift shop? 

Vincent
Van Gogh’s repertoire holds a
mystery. He painted his most prized masterpieces — his sunflowers and angular bedroom, for instance — within a compact
few years of a very long career. His artwork before and after that duration
were never really as worthy of the spotlight. 

Why those
years? Coincidence, maybe?

Dubbed
his “hot streak,” the master of impressionism’s rapid-fire success
has been chalked up to luck, fate and even randomness. But after researchers
analyzed dozens of his paintings with deep-learning algorithms, they found the
sudden bump in artistic wins to be anything but a coincidence. Their findings appeared Monday in the journal Nature
Communications. 

They
might’ve actually uncovered a formula: “exploration,” then
“exploitation.”

“Before
your hot streak occurs, the works you engage in tend to be exploratory, in
terms of exploring with diverse styles and topics,” said the study’s lead
author Dashun Wang, a professor of industrial engineering and management
sciences in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering.

“When
the hot streak begins,” he said, “your work has to be exploitative —
in the sense that you’ll become very focused on what you work on.”

Artistic
careers that continuously evolve and experiment with different approaches, or
those that focus only on a single angle, are less likely to have a hot streak,
the research shows. It’s the sequence of the two — a pattern Van Gogh’s
collections indicate — that drives a spike in creating masterpieces.

“Hot
streaks kind of dominate the main impact of a career,” Wang said.
“Often, the career-defining work was produced during the hot streak.”

Van Gogh
isn’t the only prominent example of the phenomenon. Jackson Pollock is famous
for his drip period between 1947 and 1950. That’s when he produced his iconic,
unique canvases layered in scribbles of colorful paint — that your elementary
school teacher probably tried to have you replicate.

Peter
Jackson, director of The Lord of The Rings trilogy, didn’t see outward success
in his films until a career-defining moment — taking the beloved fantasy
series to the screen. Thank you, hot streak, for helping give life to Sméagol.

“You
feel like it’s magic. It just happens somewhere in your career, but that’s
deeply unsatisfying,” Wang said. “The contribution of this paper is
to show that it’s not all magic.”

Maintaining a hot streak

Though
explaining the findings are more correlation than causation, meaning they
aren’t a recipe to success, Wang urges “there is some regularity” in
how artists achieve hot streaks.

To unlock
the mystery, his team’s algorithms — repurposed from those used in driverless
cars — scanned artists’ paintings for brushstroke trends, linear orientation
and use of various objects. They analyzed directors’ filmography for cast
selection, genre and identifiable plot structure, and they dissected
scientists’ publications for cited literature and topics. Altogether, they
studied thousands of hot streak incidences.

“If
we want to know what happens around hot streaks, we’ve got to look at the work
itself, look into whether the character of the work is different — before and
after the hot streak began,” Wang said.

Sure
enough, prior to the beginning of his hot streak in 1888, Van Gogh’s brush
movements were all over the place — so were Pollock’s before his own streak.
Jackson’s movies leaned into contrasting directions of genre and cast
choice. 

But
during their streaks, each career focused on what suited the creator best.

Wang
hopes the team’s novel findings of how hot streaks begin will lead to
predictive tools that can help procure such short-lived, yet strong, success
for people on demand.

Imagine
if, one day, we could look back at our careers and calculate which style or
topic we explored will most likely foster a masterpiece. But the team’s next
big question is, “How can we know when to enter the exploitative phase in
the first place?”

Wang
reflects on how, during his book signings, he used to say “May the hot
streak be with you.”

“For
the longest time, I felt like this was just a wish. That what I said to them is
the same as good luck. But I think now — at least in my mind — this is going
beyond just good luck.”