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Subject:

Of Canvases and Coefficients

From:

Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Fri, 26 Apr 2002 15:18:02 +0200

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (251 lines)

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."


_________________________________________________________________

This article from The Chronicle is available online at this address:

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i32/32a02001.htm

If you would like to have complete access to The Chronicle's Web
site, a special subscription offer can be found at:
   http://chronicle.com/4free
_________________________________________________________________

You may visit The Chronicle as follows:

    * via the World-Wide Web, at http://chronicle.com
    * via telnet at chronicle.com

_________________________________________________________________
  Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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