by Jon Lackman | 7 January 2010 | Uncategorized
I recently played around with Google Trends, a tool that allows you to see how often a word or phrase has been searched over the last few years. Alas, “art history” has apparently experienced a steady decline since 2004. Likewise for “history of art”, “art,” “painting,” “sculpture,” “architecture,” and most individual artists I tried such as Michelangelo, Jan van Eyck, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Monet, Duchamp, Matthew Barney, and Hokusai.
Most interested in “art history,” according to Google, is New Zealand, followed by the U.S.A., Ireland, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, India, Italy, Netherlands, and Germany. Among U.S. cities, Santa Barbara is most interested by far, confirming, perhaps, Dave Hickey’s observation that Santa Barbara is “a hellish paradise.”
