A MOMA Plot

From Oliver Roeder at the blog FiveThirtyEight this is a 'scatter plot' of the size of all 2,229 paintings in the Museum of Modern Art. The size of each painting is plotted with Width on the x-axis and Height on the y-axis. This data point serves as the top right corner of the painting's rectangle. There is so much variability among so many smaller paintings that they get over plotted on the graph, so much that only a purple blob is produced.

They go on to consider only the smaller paintings with only the top right corner's data point. This resolves the purple blog into data points for each painting, but some detail is still lost in the over-plotting of these points.

More at FiveThirtyEight.