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Posts Tagged ‘Art’

Does Eccentricity Raise the Value of Art?

Artists may often be eccentric, but does eccentricity increase the worth of an artist’s work?  That’s the question asked by psychologists Wijnand van Tilburg and Eric Igou in a new paper on eccentricity and art. Here’s a summary from BPS Research Digest:

Wijnand van Tilberg and Eric Igou tested these ideas across five studies. In the first, 38 students rated a painting by Van Gogh more positively if they were first told about the ear-cutting incident. In two other studies, dozens more students rated paintings by a fictional Icelandic artist more positively and estimated it to be more valuable if they were told he had an eccentric personality, or if they saw a photograph showing him looking eccentric, unshaven with half-long hair (as opposed to seeing a photo showing him looking conventional, with short hair and neat clothing).



CSI: Art Edition

Forensic scientist Nicholas Petraco, who analyzed ashes in our podcast “The Troubled Cremation of Stevie the Cat,” is currently embroiled in a debate about a Jackson Pollock painting. From The New York Times:

On one side stands Francis V. O’Connor, a stately Old World-style connoisseur with a Vandyke beard and curled mustache, who believes erudition and a practiced eye are essential to judging authenticity. Mr. O’Connor, a co-editor of the definitive Pollock catalog and a member of the now-disbanded Pollock-Krasner Foundation authentication committee, said “Red, Black and Silver” does not look like a Pollock.

“I don’t think there’s a Pollock expert in world that would look at that painting and agree it was a Pollock,” Mr. O’Connor said at a symposium this month.



The Real Fake

Last week, we described how the famed U.K. street artist Banksy had set up a stand in New York’s Central Park selling real Banksy pieces – stenciled figures spray-painted on canvas – for $60. The art was worth a lot more than that, yet almost no one bought any. We asked how that could be – and got a lot of great reader responses in the comments. Thanks!

It turns out that there’s a second part to this story. One week after Banksy tried and failed to sell his art, a bunch of unrelated artists set up a stand selling fake Banksys for $60. The pieces were exact replicas of the ones Banksy had tried to sell in his stand.  But this time the artists told shoppers very clearly that the pieces were fake. And yet they sold out their stock in an hour.



When a Fake Banksy Is a Real Banksy

Many news outlets this week carried the story that Banksy, the celebrated British street artist, had set up an innocuous-looking booth near Central Park that offered original signed works for $60 each—despite their value being much closer to $60,000 apiece.  Even with this astounding discount, only a handful were sold—as the video in the post, from Banksy’s website, shows.

What’s interesting to us is what this says about art and the role of copies. While copying is a huge concern in many art forms—especially music and film—in fine art, it is comparatively insignificant. In China, there are whole villages full of artisans devoted to copying the great masters of Western art, and certainly fakes and frauds are well known in the West as well. Yet there is not a thriving black market in Banksy knockoffs—or, for that matter, in the work of other major contemporary artists.  Why is that?



The Authors of The Knockoff Economy Answer Your Questions

We want to thank everyone for their questions — it’s great to see people responding to, critiquing and, in some cases, tweaking, the ideas we set out in The Knockoff Economy. We are fascinated by the complex relationship between copying and creativity — and we’re thankful that many of you are as well.  So, to the Q&A . . .

Q. The issue that concerns my industry most is internet sales of prescription skin products such as retin-A and hydroquinone. Some might be counterfeit, but many are probably diverted products. The manufacturer sells them to a physician, the unscrupulous physician sells them on the internet at a deep discount, the patient may be hurt by expired or dangerous medications or may not use them correctly even if they are real. This hurts legitimate physicians by drawing business away from them, but also hurts a manufacturer’s reputation. (Apparently, people who have qualms about buying Viagra online don’t think twice before buying skin medications from those same sources.)

Do you plan to do any research in this area? Will you be looking at diversion in addition to counterfeits?



Excerpt from The Knockoff Economy: Tweakonomics

Here is an excerpt from The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation, which has just been published by Oxford University Press. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be running 2 excerpts from the book here on the blog and taking questions from Freakonomics readers in a Q&A. We’ll also run a contest for the wackiest photo of a knockoff item. 

In The Knockoff Economy we examine the relationship between copying and creativity. Most people who study this area look at industries such as music or publishing, where intellectual property (IP) protections are central. We do something different: we explore innovative industries—such as fashion, food, fonts, and finance–in which IP is either unavailable or not effective. In these industries copying is common, yet we find that innovation thrives. In a world in which technology is making copying ever easier, we think these industries have a lot to teach us. And one of the key lessons is that copying is not just a destructive force; it can also be productive. Harnessing the productive side of copying—the ability to refine, improve, and update existing innovations—is at the heart of this excerpt.

THE KNOCKOFF ECONOMY
CHAPTER 4

Rules against copying don’t just cover outright imitation. They also address variations: works that use that some portion of another creative work but add in new stuff, and in the process transform the original work. Think of Shepard Fairey’s famous Hope poster of Barack Obama, which took an existing photograph and reworked it into an iconic image: 



When Graffiti Strikes Back

We’ve written a few times about what we call reverse incentives: comedian and activist Dick Gregory‘s use of the N word; Planned Parenthood turning abortion protestors into a fund-raising scheme; and the “pledge-a-picket” drive.

The latest instance comes from fashion designer Marc Jacobs. It began when the graffiti artist Kidult vandalized Jacobs’s SoHo shop by scrawling “ART” across the storefront. A Twitter war followed, but Jacobs wasn’t done. As The New York Observer reports:



More Demand, More Paintings

A sign on the wall at an exhibit of René Magritte paintings noted, “Magritte repeatedly painted variants of his subjects, mostly to satisfy demand in the art market.”  Even artists are selling their products, just as businesses do.  When the demand for their product increases, it calls forth a supply.  We also see this in popular literature, where a highly successful mystery writer winds up in a rut writing minor variations of an earlier hit.  Sadly for us economists, this doesn’t seem as easy to do—the premium is on originality and novelty; if today’s demand called forth minor repetitions in what we supply, we soon wouldn’t get the stuff published very well!



Question of the Day: Does a Lack of Exposure to the Arts Lead to Disaster?

A reader named Matt Radcliffe writes:

I’ve been working on a project concerning musical theater performance. I have a hypothesis which seems intuitive enough to me — that a lack of exposure to creative arts can lead to disastrous results for individuals (lack of education, poverty, etc).

I can find a plethora of research that proves the opposite (exposure to creative arts can lead to success), but I can’t find anything towards my hypothesis.



The Unequal Couple

Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting The Unequal Couple (Old Man in Love) illustrates exchange in the marriage market.  An unusually looks-challenged old man, holding a gorgeous necklace, embraces a beautiful young woman, who seems pleased with the arrangement.  

Nearly 500 years ago, Cranach recognized that in the marriage market men typically exchange their earning ability for a woman’s looks and reproductive ability.  That is probably less true today than in Cranach’s time (early 16thcentury), but the evidence shows it is still partly valid.



Artist Resale Royalties: Do They Help or Hurt?

In America, it’s sometime said, all big trends start in California. That’s true for great things like hot tubs, the iPod, and Pinkberry. It’s also true for bad things, like tax revolts, Pinkberry, and . . . artist resale royalties.

Artist resale royalties? In a previous post, we explained how California’s law guaranteeing artists 5 percent of the profits from any later sale of their artwork has some unintended consequences. The California law helps the tiny fraction of artists fortunate enough to have their work appreciate significantly in value. But it does nothing for the 99% of artists whose work has little enduring commercial value. Not only does it not help them, it probably hurts them.



The World's Most Expensive Photograph

A photograph of a river, some grass, and sky was auctioned at Christie’s in New York last week for a record-setting $4,338,500 to an unknown buyer. “Rhein II,” created in 1999 by German artist Andreas Gursky, beat out Cindy Sherman‘s previous photo auction record of $3.89 million in May, 2011.

We can’t repost an image of it, copyright and what not; though you can see it in the link above. But “Rhein II” measures 6 feet by 11 feet. The picture is one in a series of six photographs – the other five live in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern.



Artist Profit-Sharing: Another Example of How California Is Like Europe

How is California more like Europe than the United States? We can think of a few ways, but one of the most interesting involves the rights of artists. As this recent story in the New York Times points out, in 1976 California passed a law that guarantees artists 5 percent of the profits in a later sale of their artwork. In doing so, California copied France and a number of other nations, in which such profit-sharing with artists is required by law. In the rest of the United States, by contrast, artists have no right to the profits a collector might make when they resell their artwork.

From an economic point of view, the California rule is a little strange. As we discussed in a previous post, if I sell my house and in five years it rises substantially in value (an anachronistic example these days, we recognize), I don’t get a cut of the windfall. A deal is a deal.



Inheriting a Rembrandt: A Rare Case of a Monopoly

We inherited several art works, including a Rembrandt etching—a portrait of an old man. Is it worth anything?? An art appraiser/detective hunted down its story. The print itself is new—pulled on highest-quality paper in the 1990s from Rembrandt’s plates. Apparently no prints were made in most of the 20th century. In the 1990s the plate’s owner pulled a small number, but none since, and none planned.
The owner has a monopoly on the plate and understands revenue maximization (there are essentially no variable costs): Pull just enough prints to have sufficient quantity to drive the price elasticity of demand to unity, but no more than that. Not only does his strategy gain him the most revenue, but it keeps the price of our print up in case we decide to sell it. This is a rare case where I benefit from monopoly!




Smallpox as Art

Installation artist Luke Jerram creates glass sculptures of diseases to “contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial coloring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena.”



FREAK Shots: Bird Critics

A new study by a research team from Tokyo’s Keio University found that pigeons can distinguish between paintings the researchers consider good and bad.




It Takes a Free Market to Build a Toaster

It takes a lot of people to manufacture even the simplest products, so making a household appliance on your own shouldn’t be expected to be easy. It may even be impossible. That’s what the artist Thomas Thwaites is finding as he tries to make a toaster from scratch, traveling around the world to collect raw materials and refining his own petroleum for plastic moldings.




How the O.G.'s Did Business

The We Are Supervision blog has a collection of business cards used by Chicago street gangs during the 1970’s and 1980’s. They are extremely interesting as well as — depending on where you work — extremely NSFW.



Ballet Dancers Have a Leg Up on Basketball Players

Over the past half-century, ballet dancers who perform Sleeping Beauty at London’s Royal Opera House have been raising their legs higher and higher. (More here.) So why, over the same time period, have professional basketball players not improved their free-throw shooting?



Boo This Post

Terry Teachout, meditating on a rare outburst of booing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, wonders if classical music and theater are being diminished by a superabundance of standing ovations and a scarcity of negative feedback. What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters? Not too long ago, they did; in 1849, to pick an extreme . . .



Turning Money Into Art

| For those of you who enjoy dollar origami, we bring you a gallery of Mark Wagner‘s intricate and beautiful dollar bill collages. His portrait of Marxism is our favorite. [%comments]



The Art of Catastronomics

| You’re so frustrated by the stock market that you want to break something, so you insert a coin into this objet/vending machine, which slowly spins out a piece of china until it drops to the ground, shattering. But the market (like all complex human systems) is more like these sculptures by Michael Kontopoulos, which whack themselves into instability, teeter . . .



Overstatement of the Day?

| From a New York Times review of an art exhibit by Shepard Fairey, the street artist best known for creating the Obama “hope” poster: “Before the Saks campaign makes it painful even to think about this artist, who did more than any other to get our current president elected …” If that is remotely true, expect the salaries of . . .



Ralph Steadman Answers Your Questions

Ralph Steadman, self portrait from Stop Smiling magazine. Last week we solicited your questions for British cartoonist and caricaturist Ralph Steadman. He graciously fielded your questions about his friendship with the late Hunter Thompson (a “partnership and provocation,” he called it), why his work can be found on beer labels, and why an artist should constantly imitate himself. He also . . .



Bring Your Questions for Ralph Steadman

Ralph Steadman, self portrait from Stop Smiling magazine. British cartoonist and caricaturist Ralph Steadman is best known as the late Hunter Thompson‘s collaborator. Starting with their first assignment together — illustrating the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s (Steadman forgot his “colors” and drew with a friend’s makeup samples) — Thompson and Steadman invented a genre of narrative storytelling that may (or . . .



What Does $33.6 Million Mean in the Art World?

Lucian Freud‘s painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping recently set a sale record for a living artist at $33.6 million. Does this symbolize a thriving art market, is it a happy exception, or is it even worth the price? According to one estimate, the money paid for the painting could have paid for 20 minutes of America’s gasoline consumption. Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, . . .



The FREAK-est Links

Author visits all 22 countries ranked “happier” than the U.S. (Earlier) Scientists study the key to artists’ improvisation Bigger computer monitors may lead to greater worker productivity Will hefty cash prizes stimulate “revolutionary” science? (Earlier)