Jul 26th 2023

Improving Art History

by David Galenson

David W. Galenson is Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago; Academic Director of the Center for Creativity Economics at Universidad del CEMA, Buenos Aires; and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His publications include Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge University Press and NBER, 2009).

 

I want to talk about improving our understanding of the history of art; specifically, I want to tell a story about the relationship between market structure and creativity.  Art historians have never understood economics, and as a result they believe they can ignore markets: in their view, the production of art can be treated in isolation from its sale.  This is of course disastrously wrong.  But their ignorance has led to a neglect of the economic history of art.  Today I'd like to illustrate the intellectual rewards for remedying this.

Many years ago, when I was a senior in college, I took a wonderful course on the history of modern art.  The text was an excellent book by George Heard Hamilton, titled Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940.  Hamilton opened the book with a striking statement, which I quote:

In the half-century between 1886, the date of the last Impressionist exhibition, and the beginning of World War II, a change took place in the theory and practice of art that was as radical and momentous as any that had occurred in human history.  It was based on the belief that works of art need not imitate or represent natural objects and events. Therefore artistic activity is not essentially concerned with representation, but instead with objects expressive of human experience.

Hamilton's subsequent description of the development of modern art was so absorbing that it never occurred to me that neither he nor the professor who taught the course not only never explained why this radical change occurred, but never even raised the question.

Fast forward to the 1990s, when I discovered that there are two very different kinds of artistic innovator.  And this led me to a reinterpretation of one of the key episodes in the history of modern art, the Impressionist group exhibitions that began in 1874.  For what I now understood was that Claude Monet and his friends were at a disadvantage not only because they were outsiders in a hierarchical art world that favored artists who had ties to the official Ecole des Beaux Arts, but that they were the wrong kind of artist to compete in that system.  The problem was that as experimental artists, who painted directly, without preparatory studies, they were unable to construct the large and complex figure studies that were necessary to gain attention in the crowded halls of the official Salon.  And it made perfect sense for experimental painters to design their own group exhibitions so as to allow each artist to present a large number of smaller paintings.

The Impressionist exhibitions were intended simply to provide a showcase for Monet, Pissarro, and their colleagues, but they famously had much more momentous consequences, as their critical success - remarkably - led to the effective collapse of an already weakened official Salon.   The Academy of Fine Arts now completely lost its control of the art market, for aspiring artists no longer had to satisfy the conservative juries of the Salon in order to have their work exhibited and reviewed.  The void left by the official Salon was filled not only by the Impressionist exhibitions, but also by other group exhibitions that followed their lead.

This produced a change in the economic structure of the market for advanced art.  Until the 1870s, the official Salon held an effective monopoly over the ability of artists to enter that market successfully.  But the end of the monopoly introduced a new element of competition.  Paul Gauguin observed that the final decades of the 19th century constituted a new regime for artists: "When they want to exhibit their work, the painters choose the day, the hour, the hall that suits them.  There are no juries."  And he recognized a consequence: "Today boldness is no longer blackballed."

This new era of competition made the Paris art world of the 1880s a battleground, in which new styles competed for critical prestige.  Ironically the Impressionists, who had fought to create the new regime, came under the most severe attack, as ambitious younger artists contended to unseat Monet and his colleagues as the leaders of advanced art.  And in a preview of the future, the innovations of these younger artists would have a source very different from those of the Impressionists: their art would not be based on vision, but would express their ideas and emotions.

The role of galleries also began to change.  Previously, galleries had exhibited the work of artists who had received honors at the Salon.  But in the 1880s Paul Durand-Ruel presented a series of solo exhibitions for the Impressionists.  These had little success, but they pointed to the future, in which gallery exhibitions would replace group shows altogether.

The first artist to rise to prominence by exhibiting exclusively in galleries was Pablo Picasso.  Picasso was the young artistic genius who was the key figure in the radical change George Heard Hamilton described,  for Cubism was the first movement, in Hamilton's words, "in which the work of art is no longer a description or illusion of actuality."  But what has been much less appreciated by art historians is the fact that Picasso was also the entrepreneurial genius who created a competitive market among dealers.  Picasso settled in Paris in 1901, at the age of 20, and during the next two decades painted portraits of a dozen dealers, as he systematically cultivated those who could sell his work and spread his reputation.  When the Italian painter Umberto Boccioni visited Paris in 1911, he reported to a friend that "The young man ruling the roost here now is Picasso.  The painter scarcely finishes a work before it is carted off and paid for by the dealers in competition with each other."

The rise of competition created even greater incentives for conspicuous innovation.  Over time, critics, dealers, and collectors had learned about the new economics of modern art.  Every time a modern artist became famous, from Monet, Cezanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin on, one element of their careers that invariably gained a great deal of attention was the complete early neglect of their work.  Each such episode carried a powerful lesson about unexploited profit opportunities, and intensified the search for new innovators.  The young artists who innovated most conspicuously were conceptual.  And so the new century became an era of conceptual innovations.

Picasso initiated this new regime with the radical new style of Cubism, which quickly gave rise to such other movements as Futurism, Suprematism, and De Stijl.  But Picasso didn't stop there.  In 1912 he made the first collage, by violating the centuries-old convention that nothing other than paint could be placed on the surface of a canvas.  This inspired other young conceptual artists to create their own new genres: later in 1912, Picasso's friend Georges Braque invented papier-colle; the next year Vladimir Tatlin, excited by a visit to Picasso's studio, invented the counter-relief; also in 1913 Marcel Duchamp invented the readymade; and on and on.  During the next seven decades, nearly 50 new genres were invented, all by young conceptual innovators.

And Picasso was still not finished.  During the 1910s he began doing something equally radical, by working simultaneously in multiple styles.  Style had traditionally been an artist's identity, a personal hallmark to be developed and guarded.  But Picasso declared that styles were merely languages, to be used and discarded at will.  Marcel Duchamp seized on this new conception of style, and he and his friends Francis Picabia and Man Ray began to make changes of style a deliberate practice.  They would be followed by a succession of young conceptual artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Damien Hirst.

Picasso created the first conceptual revolutions of the new century, but other young conceptual artists recognized what he had done, and followed his lead.  Marcel Duchamp created the model of the artistic trickster with his porcelain urinal readymade, a radical challenge to conventional art that forced debate over whether he was serious or joking, and his innovation was adopted by other provocative masters of ambiguity - Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Piero Manzoni, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst, to name a few.  Georges Braque introduced letters into his paintings, and the use of language became an important element of conceptual 20th-century art.  And on and on.

I don't have time to go through a more complete list of what I have called conceptual revolutions; for anyone interested in this, I wrote a book with that title.   Let me just point out that art historians' inability to deal with an era that has no dominant styles led them to coin the empty label "post-modern."  That term is simply their admission that they cannot understand an era of conceptual innovations, in which a succession of isolated young innovators has replaced the stylistic movements of the past.

The moral of my story is that we can genuinely understand art history only by taking account of economic forces.   The radical developments in art in the past 150 years have been directly related to changes in the structure of art markets.  And this is of course only the modern era.  We have elements of an economic history of art prior to the modern era that are both richly empirical and informed by an economist's understanding of how market forces affect production: prominent examples are John Michael Montias' study of Dutch art in the Golden Age, and Federico Etro's studies of the development of the market for art in Italy and elsewhere from the Renaissance on.  But we still have no integrated economic history of art, including the major innovations and innovators.  Many opportunities remain.

Browse articles by author

More Essays

Nov 28th 2024
EXTRACT: "Researchers analysed data from two major prostate cancer prevention trials, linking them with Medicare health records to track outcomes for over 29,000 participants. Among these, nearly 4,000 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer. Of this group, 655 underwent surgery to remove the prostate (prostatectomy), 1,056 received radiotherapy, and 2,235 did not receive treatment."
Nov 17th 2024
EXTRACT: "The weight-loss jab Wegovy made its debut on June 4 2021. It was the first new weight-loss drug to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration since 2014. There has been a lot of excitement since the launch. Not only is the drug extremely effective (people lose about 15% of their body weight in a year), it also appears to have many benefits beyond just weight loss. It’s worth noting that the drug (generic name: semaglutide) was first used to treat diabetes, and indeed is still a blockbuster diabetes drug. So that’s two benefits already. Let’s look at some of the other potential benefits. Here are eight (and the list isn’t exhaustive)."
Oct 11th 2024
EXTRACTS: "Between 1939 and 1945, around 10% of concentration camp guards were women, yet these Aufseherinnen (overseers) as they were known, barely feature in Holocaust history or literature." ------ "One little Aufseherin, twenty years old, who had so little knowledge that she said 'excuse me' when walking in front of a prisoner, and who was visibly frightened by the first round of brutality she saw, needed exactly four days to adjust her tone and procedures, although it was totally new to her." ----- " 'The most frightening news brought about by the Holocaust and by what we learned of its perpetrators was not the likelihood that ‘this’ could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it.' ---- The true horror of genocide is found in the similarity between us and the perpetrators, not in the difference."
Oct 9th 2024
EXTRACT: "In 1928, Walt Disney's fledgling animation studio lost most of its staff to a rival company, his two latest cartoons had not found a buyer, and he had had to sell his car to meet payroll.  Disney's innovative response changed his industry, and American popular culture."
Sep 26th 2024
EXTRACT: "When it comes to economic policy, Carter is sometimes blamed for excessive regulation, government spending, and runaway inflation. His successor, Ronald Reagan, is often credited with ending the era of “big government.” But the conventional narrative fails to acknowledge that it was Carter who launched the deregulatory push that bore fruit during the Reagan years."
Sep 26th 2024
EXTRACT: "Buffett's status as the Oracle of Omaha stemmed from his ability to develop the wisdom and judgment that transformed him from a good conceptual investor into an exceptional experimental one."
Sep 26th 2024
EXTRACT: "Last year, a social-media trend featured women asking men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The answer, it seemed, was “very”: many men claimed that the ancient empire crossed their minds weekly or even daily. That did not surprise Mike Duncan, the host of the popular 'History of Rome' podcast, and probably not Tom Holland, who has written multiple bestselling books on the topic. Mary Beard certainly understands the popular fascination, too. Her study of ancient Rome – together with her unpretentious style and brash charisma – has made her what one observer called 'a national treasure, and easily the world’s most famous classicist.' ” ----- "Beard challenges this mythology of whiteness, arguing in her 2016 book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome that the story of the Roman Empire, which was necessarily ethnically diverse, is 'the history of people of color'. In fact, the book concludes with Emperor Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to all the empire’s subjects. The old Roman aristocracy lost its privileges, because it had not shared them."
Sep 22nd 2024
EXTRACTS: "Since the golden age of Athenian democracy, freedom of speech has been viewed as a defining feature of open societies, even as it remains under constant attack. The Athenians believed that the proper functioning of government depended on free and honest exchange of ideas, no matter how controversial or unpopular. In ancient Rome, by contrast, only senators enjoyed anything resembling free speech – and even then, as the statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero learned the hard way, speaking out could have deadly consequences." ----- "In our hyper-connected world, where mobile phones outnumber people and most of the global population has internet access, the decline of traditional news outlets has deepened our dependence on social media. As opaque algorithms shape the news we consume and our perception of reality, the corporations and oligarchs controlling these platforms pose a growing threat to free speech. Although they claim to be its ultimate defenders, their business model, by amplifying disinformation and identity-based grievances for profit, renounces the responsibility that sustains it."
Jul 27th 2024
EXTRACT: "Some conservative intellectuals think the west has already adopted Christianity-lite. Many point to the book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019), by historian Tom Holland. Holland argues that despite declining religious belief, Christian ideas remain central to western civilisation. He views liberalism – our dominant political philosophy – as secularised Christianity. For him, core western ideas, like universal human rights, equality and dignity, stem from Christianity."
Jul 26th 2024
EXTRACTS: "We often hear about the importance of the human microbiome – the vast collection of bacteria and fungi that live on and inside us – when it comes to our health. But there’s another, equally important part of this microbial community that remains far less known: the virome." ----- "Viruses are the most abundant biological entities on Earth, with an estimated 10³¹ viral particles globally and about 10¹³ in each human being." ----- "Understanding the virome could revolutionise medicine and public health."
Jul 16th 2024
EXTRACTS: "Trump joins tens of thousands of Americans treated for non-fatal gunshot wounds each year. Such experiences can shatter people’s assumptions that they are living in a safe, understandable and controllable world, leaving them feeling unworthy, unsafe and unsure. As a result, survivors of non-fatal gun violence face increased risks of depression, anxiety, substance use and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD can feel overwhelming." ---- ".... some trauma survivors experience post-traumatic growth. They may develop greater empathy, stronger relationships, deeper spirituality and find new meaning in life. After being shot in 1981, the then president Ronald Reagan’s trauma seemed to deepen his sense of empathy and humility. He felt God had spared him for a reason, spurring him to reduce nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union."
Jul 15th 2024
EXTRACTS: "Artificial sweeteners such as sucralose are not metabolised by the human body so they are excreted – this is what makes them low-calorie sugar alternatives. And that’s where the environmental problem begins. Current wastewater treatment plants are unable to remove these sugar mimics, meaning they end up in our environment – in our water, rivers and soil." --- "Forever chemicals are increasingly present in our streams, rivers and oceans – most notably per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that don’t degrade. PFAS are synthetic chemicals found in many consumer products, including skincare products, cosmetics and waterproof clothing. PFAS can remain in the human body for many years, and some present significant risks to our health – potentially causing liver damage, thyroid disease, obesity, infertility and cancer."
Jul 3rd 2024
EXTRACTS: "Psychologist, James Hillman had concerns about what I like to call the 'loneliness-as-pathology' "---- "....Hillman went on to argue...: 'If loneliness is an archetypal sense built into us all from the very beginning, then, to be alive is also to be lonely. Loneliness, therefore, will come and go as it chooses in the course of a lifetime, quite apart from our efforts to deny or avoid this reality.' "
Jul 3rd 2024
EXTRACT: "How can we be at least 15 times richer than our pre-industrial Agrarian Age predecessors, and yet so unhappy? One explanation is that we are not wired for it: nothing in our heritage or evolutionary past prepared us to deal with a society of more than 150 people. To operate our increasingly complex technologies and advance our prosperity, we somehow must coordinate among more than eight billion people."
Jun 25th 2024
EXTRACTS: "What’s interesting about the entire Russia-North Korea showy display of camaraderie is China’s response: silence. China has misgivings about how things are unfolding, which reports suggest prompted Chinese president Xi Jinping’s call to Putin to call off the latter’s visit to Pyongyang. Obviously, Putin didn’t heed Xi’s request." ----- "The Sino-Korean animosity dates back centuries and took shape when Korea was a vassal state of imperial China. Unfortunately, this animosity extended to modern times when Mao Zedong decided to station Chinese troops in North Korea even after the conclusion of the Korean war, and when Beijing did not aid Pyongyang in its nuclear ambitions. It didn’t help either that the founding leader of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, was suspected of espionage and was nearly executed by the Chinese Communist party in the 1930s."
Jun 19th 2024
EXTRACT: "Ultra-processed foods (such as packaged snacks, sugary drinks, instant noodles and ready-to-eat meals) often contain emulsifiers, microparticles (such as titanium dioxide), thickeners, stabilisers, flavours and colourants. While research on humans is limited, studies on mice have shown that these ingredients alter the gut microbiome (the community of microorganisms living in the intestines) in several ways. These many microbiome changes can in turn affect the way the immune system functions."
Jun 9th 2024
EXTRACT: "Alzheimer’s disease can be split in two subgroups, familial and sporadic. Only 5% of patients with Alzheimer’s are familial, inherited, and 95% of Alzheimer’s patients are sporadic, due to environmental, lifestyle and genetic risk factors. Consequently, the most effective tactic for tackling Alzheimer’s is preventative and living a healthy lifestyle. This has led researchers to study risk factors associated with Alzheimer’s."
Mar 8th 2024
EXTRACT: "This study suggests that around 10% of people diagnosed with dementia may instead have underlying silent liver disease with HE causing or contributing to the symptoms – an important diagnosis to make as HE is treatable."
Jan 28th 2024
EXTRACT: "Health disparity is a powerful weapon in the savage class warfare otherwise known as neoliberalism. (In 2020, the RAND Corporation did a study of the transfer of wealth over the last several decades from the working-class and the middle-class to the top one percent. Their estimate is a staggering $47 trillion – that is how much the “upward redistribution of income” cost American workers between 1975 and 2018.) Neoliberalism is a brutal form of labor suppression, which uses health as a means of maintaining and reproducing a condition in which wealth is constantly being redistributed upwards, and the middle-class is kept in a constant state of fear of sinking into the ranks of the poor. Medical expenses are the leading cause of bankruptcies in America – and that’s according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. The ballooning costs of healthcare serve to maintain a system marked by morally unacceptable health inequity and injustice."
Jan 28th 2024
EXTRACT. "But living longer has also come at a price. We’re now seeing higher rates of chronic and degenerative diseases – with heart disease consistently topping the list. So while we’re fascinated by what may help us live longer, maybe we should be more interested in being healthier for longer. Improving our “healthy life expectancy” remains a global challenge. Interestingly, certain locations around the world have been discovered where there are a high proportion of centenarians who display remarkable physical and mental health. The AKEA study of Sardinia, Italy, as example, identified a “blue zone” (named because it was marked with blue pen),....."