lbo-talk-digest V1 #4566

[Ann Li]

I'm presently working on a chapter for a collection on the political economy
of art and am grateful to have some additional comic relief available to me.
Nothing is more fun than orthodox economists trying to make determinate that
which is indeterminate and ignoring the role of other institutional agents
or factors (oh gosh, history must hold the patrons and critics constant). I
love this "conceptual-experimental" pairing. On the other hand NBER folks
have too much time on their hands and should perhaps be working out more
interesting "cultural" economic activity like tyring to figure out the moral
implications of the financial transactions involved in the Travolta movie
"Swordfish"

Ann

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Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 18:05:00 -0400
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
Subject: economists do art

[Any art connoisseurs want to do to this what Leo did to the teacher crap?]

<http://papers.nber.org/papers/W8368>

Young Geniuses and Old Masters: The Life Cycles of Great Artists from
Masaccio to Jasper Johns
David W. Galenson, Robert Jensen

NBER Working Paper No. W8368
Issued in July 2001

There have been two very different life cycles for great artists:
some have made their greatest contributions very early in their
careers, whereas others have produced their best work late in their
lives. These two patterns have been associated with different working
methods, as art's young geniuses have worked deductively to make
conceptual innovations, while its old masters have worked
inductively, to innovate experimentally. We demonstrate the value of
this typology by considering the careers of four great conceptual
innovators - Masaccio, Raphael, Picasso, and Johns - and five great
experimental innovators - Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, C'zanne,
and Pollock. Recognition of the effect of an artist's methods on the
timing of his contribution appears to solve a puzzle that has been
recognized by art historians for more than a century.