Fractal geometry used to authenticate Jackson Pollock paintings

 

This actually makes a lot of sense. I've always (okay, maybe not always, but for a long time) figured that since art is a physical activity and each artist's body and movement is unique, there should be some way to measure the internal consistancy of a body of work to see if it was done within the same physical constraints. Looks like it may in fact be possible:

The physicist Richard Taylor has developed a technique for authenticating Jackson Pollock "poured" paintings -- by analyzing their fractal dimensions.

Taylor, who also has a degree in art theory, got interested in Pollock's work back in the 1990s. He suspected that Pollock's famously chaotic paintings -- created by the artist standing over the canvases and dripping paint -- displayed fractal mathematics: They had self-replicating geometry, such that the larger shapes in the picture were similar to the tiny shapes you'd see if you looked at closely the edges of the splatters. He put computer-generated grids over images of five Pollock splatter paintings and, sure enough, there they were: Two sets of fractal patterns, one that resolved on a 5 mm scale, and another on a 1 mm scale.

Via: collision detection.