The study of art evolution has provided valuable insights into societal change, often revealing long-term patterns of simplification and transformation. Album covers represent a distinctive yet understudied form of visual art that has both shaped and been shaped by cultural, technological, and commercial dynamics over the past century. As highly visible artifacts at the intersection of art and commerce, they offer a unique lens through which to study cultural evolution. In this work, we examine the visual complexity of album covers spanning 75 years and 11 popular musical genres. Using a diverse set of computational measures that capture multiple dimensions of visual complexity, our analysis reveals a broad shift toward minimalism across most genres, with notable exceptions that highlight the heterogeneity of aesthetic trends. At the same time, we observe growing variance over time, with many covers continuing to display high levels of abstraction and intricacy. Together, these findings position album covers as a rich, quantifiable archive of cultural history and underscore the value of computational approaches in the systematic study of the arts, bridging quantitative analysis with aesthetic and cultural inquiry.

翻译：艺术演变的研究为社会变迁提供了宝贵的见解，常常揭示出长期存在的简化和转型模式。专辑封面作为一种独特但研究不足的视觉艺术形式，在过去一个世纪中既塑造了文化、技术和商业动态，也深受其影响。作为艺术与商业交汇处高度可见的人工制品，它们为研究文化演变提供了一个独特的视角。在本研究中，我们考察了跨越75年、涵盖11种流行音乐流派的专辑封面的视觉复杂度。通过采用一系列捕捉视觉复杂度多个维度的计算度量方法，我们的分析揭示了大多数流派普遍转向极简主义的趋势，同时存在显著的例外情况，凸显了审美趋势的异质性。与此同时，我们观察到随时间推移而增长的方差，许多封面作品持续展现出高度的抽象性和复杂性。这些发现共同将专辑封面定位为一个丰富、可量化的文化历史档案，并强调了计算方法在系统化艺术研究中的价值，从而在定量分析与美学及文化探究之间架起了桥梁。