Dear Colleagues,
While this is somewhat off-topic for design
research, those also active in art research
will find this intriguing.
It raises interesting issues on the application
of research methods across the boundaries
of disciplines -- and it suggests that the issue
of accepting different methods applied to subject
fields depends more on customs within the
field than on the quality of methods or the
elegance of the research.
I'll read the book myself before saying more.
The economics of art was a field that was
central to my work in the 1980s. Without
accepting Galenson's findings, my experience
was that art historians were frequently unwilling
to accept evidence of social and economic
factors in the influence and prestige of artists
and their work.
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from: [log in to unmask]
From the issue dated April 19, 2002
Of Canvases and Coefficients
By SCOTT McLEMEE
In the marketplace of ideas, controversy has become a
spectacle as tightly scripted as the commercials in prime
time. Any new concept supposedly meets "a growing surge of
interest," spurring "intense academic debate," and so forth.
In March, the student newspaper at the University of Chicago
ran an article about Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of
Creativity in Modern Art (Harvard University Press), a new
book by David W. Galenson, a Chicago faculty member. Mr.
Galenson, a professor of economics, applies statistical
methods to the analysis of avant-garde painting -- treating
aesthetic innovations as, in effect, a function of the labor
market among bohemians. "A heated debate has ensued over the
future of art history, pitting traditionalists against more
experimental thinkers," wrote the student reporter.
Mr. Galenson himself knows better. Scholars are not debating
his work, heatedly or otherwise. If he were dropped into a
crowd of art historians, Mr. Galenson could not get arrested.
Over the years, he says, he has submitted his findings to the
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Art Bulletin, and
other journals devoted to scholarship on painting -- only to
meet a wall of silence. "The editors didn't send them out for
review," he recalls, "and they didn't explain why either."
(Representatives of the Journal and the Bulletin would not
confirm Mr. Galenson's claim, citing their confidentiality
policies.)
The response among his peers was a bit warmer. "Two of the
very first papers I wrote on this subject were published in
The American Economic Review and the Journal of Political
Economy," he says, naming two of the leading publications in
his field. Whatever his colleagues think of Jackson Pollock's
drip paintings, they were very favorably impressed with Mr.
Galenson's command of statistical methodology. "Economists
have no objection to this work," he says, "other than the fact
that they don't find art important."
The situation is fraught with irony. At a time when
"interdisciplinarity" has emerged as the academic buzzword du
jour, Mr. Galenson's transgression of the boundary between the
social sciences and the humanities ought to have won him,
well, "a growing surge of interest" -- even if he were not
doing unorthodox research on creative innovation. Discussing
his work, the economist projects an almost naive enthusiasm
about modernist painting, with just a streak of frustration
evident. "It bothers me more and more that art historians
don't seem to have any intellectual curiosity," he remarks.
But his tone is not angry, just baffled, and a little hurt.
Painting by Numbers
The problem is probably not Mr. Galenson's argument, but his
methodology. The scholarly humanist's eyes tend to glaze over
at the sight of such terms as "labor markets," "independent
variable," and "logarithm" -- and Painting Outside the Lines
contains nearly as many tables and graphs as it does
reproductions of artwork. And while each chapter of the book
is accompanied by an honor guard of quotations from major
artists, critics, and historians, Mr. Galenson forthrightly
violates an unwritten principle of the humanities: The
aesthetic domain must not be quantified.
He focuses on a period of extremely intense innovation among
painters, beginning with the Impressionists in the late 19th
century and ending with the Pop Art of the 1960s. Mr. Galenson
assembled information on the ages of artists when they painted
various works, the long-term market value of those canvases
over time, and the reputations of the artists. (How do you
calibrate an artist's reputation? Mr. Galenson hit upon the
very simple approach of tabulating the frequency with which
their work was reproduced in textbooks on art history.)
Plugging all this data into a computer, he performed a
regression analysis -- a standard tool of statistical
research, in which the relationships among various factors are
calculated relative to one or more variables.
The patterns emerging from Mr. Galenson's crunched numbers
suggested that the careers of avant-garde artists tended to
fall into two categories, embodying distinct kinds of
innovation.
Some painters developed new techniques over a long period of
experimentation, often through painstaking trial and error.
Prime examples are Paul Cezanne and Mark Rothko. By contrast,
Mr. Galenson found that other artists tended to have one or
more creative breakthroughs that he calls "conceptual": a
sudden, radical retooling of what or how they paint. The most
dramatic example would be Pablo Picasso, who ran through a
series of radically distinct and original visual idioms --
each of which seemed to emerge full-blown, as though the idea
had taken shape in his head and simply needed to be executed.
In keeping with his professional concerns, Mr. Galenson
presents the art world as a kind of market in which creativity
and skill are the commodities -- with recognition among other
artists as the strongest currency. Competition for such renown
among artists fueled the modernist demand to "make it new"; at
the same time, radical innovation itself became one of the
measures of aesthetic success. And once a painter's
innovations had won acclaim, the price tags on his or her
canvases reflected the high artistic value.
With experimentalists, says Mr. Galenson, the later canvases
tend to be the most valuable, both on the art market and in
the judgment of artists and historians. In contrast,
conceptual breakthroughs usually came early in artists'
careers. The reputation of their later work tends to fall off
drastically over time. (By the 1980s, Andy Warhol may have
still have been able to pay his steep bills by silk-screening
portraits of Manhattan socialites -- but it's the soup cans
and electric chairs he painted in the early '60s that
galleries now want to show.) The careers and reputations of
avant-garde innovators seemed to follow patterns almost as
reliable as the performance of treasury bonds.
"I was amazed when I first got these results," says Mr.
Galenson. While it might offend mandarin sensibilities to
point out the correspondence between long-term reputation and
market value, that correlation is not especially surprising.
But as he fine-tuned his statistical model, Mr. Galenson said,
he found it possible to make informed guesses based on little
more than numerical data. "I could put the prices of paintings
into the computer," he says, "and from the results could
predict what the artist said about his work and how he made
preparatory drawings."
He says that "experimentalists" tended to sketch only elements
of their work-in-progress; their drawings were just a small
part of the process of working on a painting, and the artists
often ignored them completely by the time they reached the
easel. "Conceptualists," however, tended to draft the entire
project; the idea on the canvas was comprehensively mapped
out, well before the artist picked up a brush. From raw data
on the age at which a painter did his or her best-regarded
work, Mr. Galenson says he could tell what sorts of drawings
he would find upon follow-up research.
Linda Seidel, the chair of the department of art history at
the University of Chicago, hasn't read Painting Outside the
Lines, but she has seen the papers in which Mr. Galenson
sketched his argument. She is not an enthusiast. The fact that
his book has not taken the art-history world by storm doesn't
astonish her. "When was it published? January? Well, I wrote a
book in '93 that hasn't been reviewed yet either," she says.
She notes that statistical analysis is utterly outside the
range of tools that art historians bring to their work --
which makes refereeing Mr. Galenson's work almost impossible.
Moreover, she adds, "The degree of certainty with which he
posits his argument is, I think, fundamentally antagonistic to
the way humanists do their work."
For hype-inducing purposes, however, it is certainly possible
to say that aesthetico-econometric research analysis now "has
a growing following." Mr. Galenson jokes that when he started
the research, he hoped to interest at least five art
historians in his theory -- and now he just needs to locate
four more. In the meantime, he is collaborating with Robert
Jensen, an associate professor of art history at the
University of Kentucky, whose book, Marketing Modernism in
Fin-de-Siecle Europe (Princeton University Press, 1994), also
brings economic thinking to bear on the study of artistic
innovation.
"What offends people about quantification," Mr. Jensen says,
"is that [scholars] hold art history to be the study of
incommensurable art objects, these unique things in space and
time, which can only really be understood from the lens of the
particular culture generating them." While statistical
modeling is an unspeakable language to many scholars in the
humanities, Mr. Jensen sees the deeper problem in art history
as an excessive tendency toward monographic analysis of
individual artists or works. "We've lost the capacity to
generalize about the whole history of art."
He echoes an idea that Mr. Galenson himself insists upon: The
distinction between "experimentalist" and "conceptualist"
varieties of innovation has implications well beyond the art
world. "Fundamentally, what David is arguing is that there's a
basic commonality in creative work across all intellectual
disciplines."
For now, though, there is the problem of winning Mr.
Galenson's book an audience within Mr. Jensen's home
discipline. The signs are not encouraging. Mr. Jensen notes,
for example, that his wife was trained as an art historian.
"She doesn't practice any more, but she instinctively found
[Mr. Galenson's] approach too" -- he pauses for a moment --
"general. It's just not something art historians do."
Has he persuaded her? "Not exactly," he answers. "We've just
chosen not to talk about it."
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Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
