About Art Silhouette
Art Silhouette is an independent journal about how we look at art — the market's stranger corners, the history of the silhouette, and the quiet power of negative space. We write for people who are curious about art but allergic to jargon.
Our stories range from the gloriously absurd (a banana that sold for millions) to the genuinely useful (how to size a print for your wall). What ties them together is a simple aim: to make looking at art more fun and a little more informed.
What we cover
Three subjects come back again and again, and they are more closely related than they look. The first is composition — figure and ground, scale, and the fact that the empty part of a picture is designed rather than left over. That is the ground covered in negative space in art, which is the longest and most-read piece on the site. The second is the silhouette, the cheapest portrait ever invented and the purest demonstration of the first subject: the history of silhouette art runs from an unpopular French finance minister in 1759 to Kara Walker's gallery walls. The third is the art market at its strangest, from a banana that sold for 6.2 million dollars to the 85,300 pounds the British state spent erasing a mural it never commissioned.
We are not a news desk. Stories are chosen because they illustrate something about how value and attention actually work, which is why a LEGO set, a dinosaur skeleton and a Danish psychologist's 1915 diagram can all end up in the same week's reading list.
Who writes this
Most of the journal is written and edited by Elena Marchetti, our art writer and editor. She covers silhouette art, negative space, shadow play and visual culture, and she maintains the site's free art tools. Her full bio, subject areas and article list are on the authors page.
How we work
Every article is researched and reviewed before it goes live. When we quote a price, a date or a record, we check it against the primary source — the auction house result, the museum's own page, the court or council document, the original reporting rather than an aggregator that summarised it. Figures that come from a projection or a model are labelled as projections, and where a number is genuinely disputed the article gives the range instead of picking the most dramatic end of it.
Where something is unknown, we say it is unknown. Several pieces on this site end without a verdict, because the honest answer to "is this art?" is usually that a culture has not finished deciding. We correct mistakes when readers flag them, and corrections are made in the article itself rather than quietly in the background.
We are not a gallery, a dealer or an auction house, and we do not sell the works we discuss. Where an article touches on buying or collecting, it is editorial opinion and not financial or investment advice. We have no affiliation with any museum or institution named on the site, and no story on this site has been paid for.
The free tools
Alongside the journal there are three small tools, built because the questions behind them come up constantly and the answers are mostly arithmetic. The wall art size calculator turns a sofa width and a ceiling height into a recommended artwork size and hanging centre. The artwork size visualizer places a work on a photo of your own wall and, with a reference measurement, reports its real size in centimetres. The art style quiz sorts visual taste into four collecting types in about two minutes. All three run entirely in your browser: wall photos and quiz answers are never uploaded.
Who publishes the site
Art Silhouette is published by Worlds Smart Solutions OÜ, registered in Tallinn, Estonia (registry code 17499089). Full provider details are in the imprint, and what we do and do not store is set out in the privacy notice. The site carries no display advertising and builds no advertising profiles; page views are counted in aggregate by our own analytics endpoint, as set out in the privacy notice.
Get in touch
Spotted an error or have a story idea? Email editorial@artsilhouette.com.
Last editorial review: October 2026.