A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks

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August 4, 2008
A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks
By PATRICIA COHEN

Ask David Galenson to name the single greatest work of art from the 20th century, and he unhesitatingly answers “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a 1907 painting by Picasso.

He can then tell you with certainty Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on, as well.

His confidence in the ranking doesn’t come from a stack of degrees in art history (though he has read a lot on the subject). After all, Mr. Galenson is an economist at the University of Chicago who initially specialized in colonial America. But during the past 10 years he has turned his attention to artists and creativity, convinced that the type of economic analysis that explains the $4-plus gas at the pump can also explain the greatest artists of the last 100 or so years.

His statistical approach has led to what he says is a radically new interpretation of 20th-century art, one he is certain art historians will hate. It is based in part on how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.

“Quantification has been almost totally absent from art history,” he said. “Art historians hate markets.”

To Mr. Galenson markets are what make the 20th century completely different from other eras for art. In earlier periods artists created works for rich patrons generally in the court or the church, which functioned as a monopoly. Only in the 20th century did art enter the marketplace and become a commodity, like a stick of butter or an Hermès bag. In this system, he said, breaking the rules became the most valued attribute. The greatest rewards went to conceptual innovators who frequently changed styles and invented genres. For the first time the idea behind the work of art became more important than the physical object itself.

Economists, of course, have turned their attention to the art world before. Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 classic, “Theory of the Leisure Class,” discussed how the newly moneyed turned everything, including art, into elements of conspicuous consumption. But over all, economic theories of art are still relatively rare.

In the preface to his 2000 book “Creative Industries,” the Harvard economist Richard E. Caves said that decades earlier he had come up with the idea but “thought it best postponed to a time when my reputation for professional seriousness could more comfortably be placed at risk.”

In 2002 Mr. Galenson discussed his theories about creativity in the book “Painting Outside the Lines.” Then, two years ago, he published “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity,” arguing that young innovators have a flash of inspiration that upends the existing order in an instant. There are old geniuses too, he said, but their approach is vastly different. They are what he labeled “experimentalists,” who develop their work gradually through years of trial and error.

His theory of creativity was based in part on examining auction prices. His approach was hailed by some as a breakthrough, and this spring he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue his research.

Others find the work misconceived, however. Victor Ginsburgh, an economist at the European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics, argued that the distinction between conceptualists and experimentalists is specious.

But what most bothers Mr. Galenson is his dismissal by art experts who, he writes in his forthcoming book, “almost unanimously refused to acknowledge the value that quantitative methods could have in their field.”

He intends to push his theories further in the book, which will take on the entire last century in art. Since many of the most important individual works rarely, if ever, come to market, he decided to use art history textbooks to value each piece. He tallied the number of illustrations of each piece in the 33 textbooks he found that were published between 1990 and 2005, on the assumption that the most important works merited the most illustrations.

“Important artists are innovators whose work changes the practices of their successors,” Mr. Galenson declares in his book. “The greater the changes, the greater the artist.”

“Demoiselles” came in at No. 1 with 28 illustrations. Vladimir Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International” (1919-20), a plan for a celebratory tower, came in second with 25 illustrations. “Spiral Jetty,” a gigantic earthwork coil that Robert Smithson planted in the Great Salt Lake in Utah 1970, came in third with 23, followed by Richard Hamilton’s “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?,” a 1956 collage widely considered to be the first Pop Art, with 22. Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 bronze sculpture “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” tied Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937) with 21. Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain” — a white urinal — was seventh with 18 illustrations, and his 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” was eighth with 16.

Some of these conceptual innovators — like Mr. Hamilton, Boccioni and Tatlin — are one-hit wonders, he acknowledges; they made a single breakthrough, even if they don’t rank among the best artists.

Michael Rushton, who teaches the economics of art at Indiana University, said that Mr. Galenson was on to something; in science or art, he said, “innovation really requires a market.”

Charles M. Gray, co-author of “The Economics of Art and Culture,” said, “We all want to believe there is something special about the arts, but I don’t buy that there is a difference between artistic and economic value.” The accurately priced piece will capture all of those intangibles as well, he said.

Art experts, not surprisingly, are more skeptical. “The economic notion of artists is interesting for art historians to have to grapple with,” John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus at the Museum of Modern Art, said when Mr. Galenson’s theory was described to him. “These are works in the histories that we tell of modern art. They seem to be milestones, and that’s fair enough.” But he cautioned that this approach could only go so far. “There are great, great things being made which are not reducible to statistics.”

In the hard and social sciences the number of citations — when other academics mention a work — is a standard way of gauging a thinker’s importance. Mr. Gray, Mr. Rushton and other economists like Don Thompson, author of “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark,” generally judged the counting of illustrations as a valid measure.

But Mr. Elderfield said that just as decisions about new exhibitions are based on what has already been exhibited, textbooks tend to reproduce images that have been used before. “It becomes a self-justifying system,” he said.

Mr. Elderfield added that well-known and accessible pieces tend to get reproduced more frequently. “Demoiselles” got a lot of attention when the Museum of Modern Art rescued it from obscurity in 1939, Mr. Elderfield said, whereas Picasso’s 1908 painting “Three Women” was in the Hermitage’s collection in St. Petersburg, Russia, and out of reach to the West until 1970. Before then no art book pictured “Three Women,” he said, although now it is frequently reproduced.

Arthur C. Danto, art critic for The Nation and an author of books on art, said that textbooks go through trends and have in recent years represented many more women, African-Americans and American Indians. “The art world itself became politicized,” he said, “and that has affected textbooks and the illustrations.”

A greater obstacle for Mr. Elderfield, however, are Mr. Galenson’s conclusions. “Particularly in a society that values the progressive, there is an instinct to make great and influential the same thing,” he said, “but they aren’t necessarily.”

About the ranking, Mr. Elderfield said, “Frankly, it’s preposterous.” Pressed to create a list off the top of his head, he said he would include “Demoiselles” and “Fountain,” but add Matisse’s “Red Studio,” a Cézanne “Bathers,” Malevich’s “White on White” (“a really extreme work,” he said), Miró’s “Birth of the World,” a big Pollock splatter painting, a Warhol sequence of Marilyn Monroe, Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” and a Jasper Johns American flag.

Mr. Galenson’s list doesn’t even live up to his own criterion, Mr. Elderfield added. Mr. Hamilton’s “Just What Is It?,” he said, is “a reactive work much more than a provoking work.” And “where’s Surrealism, which really had an effect?”

Mr. Danto said: “I don’t see the method as anything except circular. The frequency of an illustration doesn’t seem to me to really explain what makes an idea good.

“Somewhere along the line you’ve got to find answers to why it’s so interesting.”