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Are bigger paintings better?
Believe it or not, some art lovers hold this to be a stupid question.
But not I. So consider a simple model and imagine the rest. You are an artist and you have better and worse ideas, as defined by either marketplace success or critical acclaim (or both). You can, to some degree, allocate your ideas across different size canvases. Some ideas only work well in the small, and some ideas only work well in the large, but still there is some flexibility. You are most likely to allocate your best ideas to the most saleable medium. And since larger pictures usually sell for more than smaller ones, why not put your better ideas into the larger pictures? You won't waste a tremendous idea on a mere snippet of work, except perhaps as a practice or draft. The marginal revenue product (or "marginal critical acclaim product") will be higher for the bigger pictures. Of course we assume that the substitution effect outweighs the income effect. (Micro question: what assumptions about costs do we need? Does it suffice to assume that, given the cost of producing ideas, we can produce larger paintings at less than proportional cost? If you are Ellsworth Kelly, doubling the canvas size just isn't that big a deal...)
There are caveats. If the picture is too large, and cannot hang above a sofa, perhaps it sells for less. So throw out monotonicity. You will put your best ideas into the most saleable medium, which does not always mean "bigger."
Longer songs are not better than shorter songs. I've never paid attention to all of "Nantucket Sleigh Ride." But the best songs will be close to around three minutes long, the dominant size or "medium" for hit songs. Songwriters and composers won't put their best ideas into snippets. The best movies will be around two hours long, rather than a skit. Some artists will break these patterns for personal reasons; Peter Jackson wanted a three-hour King Kong for the (ha-ha) sake of the story. This may be a case of the income effect weighing in and financing self-indulgence.
Books should be better than short stories. Again, put your better ideas into the better-paying medium. Of course if customers use length as a signal of quality, these tendencies will be further strengthened. Intermediaries, such as networks, record companies, and your agent, will help enforce the constraints.
And how long are the best blog posts? The best comments to your wife? The best flirtations? The best comments on blog posts?
Thanks to Robin Hanson and Ilia Rainer for useful discussions of this point, and to Ilia for the question.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 18, 2006 at 05:51 AM in The Arts | Permalink
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Comments
There is a signaling effect in making a long movie as well. Of course, this only works as long as it isn't too easy to fake. Generally studios only allow movies to run over three hours if the film or its director are considered "important".
Why are canvas always quare or rectangular?
Posted by: joshg at Jan 18, 2006 8:30:13 AM
My rules of movie length:
Comedies should be no longer than 90 minutes. A high-brow comedy could push 1:45.
Action movies should be 1:45. A really good one can push 2 hours.
A drama or expansive production (i.e. Narnia, Harry Potter) can exceed two or even three hours.
Pre-NetFlix, when I went to the video store, the first thing I would check on a comedy was the run time. If it exceeded my 90 minute rule, I put it down. The few times I violated my rule, I was very disappointed.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Jan 18, 2006 9:19:14 AM
The practical issue is that galleries find
smaller works easier to sell
due to lower prices, ease of accommodation
in the home etc, so artists have to produce them. That larger works
cost more suggests most
people think them "better."
But smaller works may be better the way
appetizers are often the best dishes in a restaurant. As with
short stories vs novels this may simply get
us into the lyric/epic debate. The real
question, leaving aside Baumol's disease, is
why is art so expensive? There's a huge supply and a huge
demand, but the two sides are too far
apart on price. I've never seen a good explanation.
Posted by: Dan at Jan 18, 2006 9:36:20 AM
It's worth noting that the 3 minute popular song is an artifact of recording technology--the development of the 78 rpm record. Before that, popular songs--designed to be sung at home to piano accompaniment--were longer, sometimes much monger, than 3 minutes. The advent of new recording technologies--the LP and more recently the CD--have made it possible to , well, restructure the optimal length of the popular song.
Posted by: Donald A. Coffin at Jan 18, 2006 9:52:29 AM
One thing I've seen several writers (Isaac Asimov is one that comes to mind0 comment on is that the shorter a piece is, the harder it is to write. On the other hand, it's presumably easier to place a short story in a magazine than to get a book contract (although that depends on the strength of the magazine market).
Posted by: Devin McCullen at Jan 18, 2006 10:07:59 AM
The best comments on blog posts are short and to the point.
Posted by: Ali at Jan 18, 2006 10:14:30 AM
If you think that artists choose the size of their canvas based on saleability then you likely: (1) have a bunch of landscape paintings in your home; (2) think Normal Rockwell was an artist; and (3) "don't get" Duchamp.
All are of course valid points of view. But any decent post-modernist would choose the best size to express their ideas. Focusing on a lesser-idea just because it would be on a bigger canvas is more landscape-style thinking than art-school-trained kind of thinking.
Posted by: Macneil at Jan 18, 2006 10:31:02 AM
"Longer songs are not better than shorter songs. I've never paid attention to all of "Nantucket Sleigh Ride." But the best songs will be close to around three minutes long,"
Bhetoveen's Ninth is about an hour long.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at Jan 18, 2006 10:31:08 AM
I think there are a lot of competitive pressures felt by galleries that at least partially drive this. A show just has more good old-fashinged curb appeal if the first thing you see when you walk in the door are big bold pieces on the wall. On the other hand there are enough tiny masterpieces out there (think Bruegel or Chardin) to disprove the bigger-is-better mindset.
I'm always delighted to sell a big painting, but the reality is that at this point in my career, about 90% of what I sell are paintings of 8x10 inches and smaller, which I intentionally price to be very approachable. Of course, I'm delighted to sell those too.
Posted by: Jeff Hayes at Jan 18, 2006 11:27:55 AM
David Galenson's methodology for quantifying artistic greatness is to count the number of paintings that eventually make it into the art history textbooks. (The more you think about it, the more sense this makes.) Why not ask him? He probably has the data to hand to answer your question...
Posted by: Tim Harford at Jan 18, 2006 11:30:22 AM
Wow, I never knew that anyone believed in decent post-modernists, or that art school was likely to make a person better at judging or creating art.
I also didn't expect to hear Tyler talking about "self-indulgence". Isn't the standard economical assumption that while Peter Jackson may have been reducing the profitability of his movie by making it so long, the reduced profit (and hence income) was less valuable to him than the benefit he derived from making the movie longer than customers thought optimal?
This reminds me of a serious concern I have about the claim that tax cuts increase the encentives of the wealthy to create. That claim is only valid so long as tax cuts don't enable the wealthy to reach a part of their utility curve where increased after-tax wages = more consumption of leisure. Seinfeld, Gary Lawrson, and Bill Watterson come to mind as examples of artists who explicitly stopped producing a product that the market valued highly because they had enough money that they couldn't be further motivated by money. Michael Eisner is arguably another example. He kept coming back, but once he was wealthy enough he couldn't be bothered to care enough to do a good job, so he saved Disney and then let it die.
Posted by: michael vassar at Jan 18, 2006 12:32:13 PM
Evaluating art is a logical and sometimes involved process that can require quite a bit of knowledge of art history and history in general. While some simply know what they like and leave it at that (a totally valid point of view) I dare suggest that to appreciate post-modern art you need some kind of background.
For some, it can be sufficient background just to know that the artist is striving for something, and that every element is exactly the way it is for a reason. Figuring out those reasons can be like solving a puzzle. Sometimes you may guess wrong, but usually there are enough bread-crumbs for someone to actively pick up. In fact, some pieces by noteable artists are meant to be amusing and funny. Those "in" on the joke laugh right away, while others are unaware that a joke was made at all.
Given that, I should qualify this all by saying that most art (modern, post-modern, whatever) is bad. Some artists are just phonies and those who become really popular are sometimes better salesmen than artists. It's just like the film business: most movies are bad, most student films are terrible, but some works are just really, really great.
No one is forcing you to appreciate post-modern art at gun point, but you should at least know it could take reading several classical and popular books to even get it, in addition to participating in critiques. (Indeed, art school exposes you both to critiques, philosophical texts and art history. And, for a good measure, formal courses on how to use color effectively.)
It's exactly like how people reject economics even when they don't know the first thing about it. I can't force them to read economic texts, so they typically continue spouting economic-nonsense and a sense that somehow thousands of economists must be wrong because what the field seems like to them is just ideological nonsense. I used to argue against economic arguments until I actually took the time to study economics. Now I have completely different point of view and am all the more enlightened because of it.
Posted by: Macneil at Jan 18, 2006 1:18:07 PM
Hmm. There might be another few elements to be taken into account too.
* Artists' capacities. Books and movies are -- like operas -- extremely demanding. Scale-wise, they're at the outer limits of what creative people can manage. Which may mean that 1) it's common for creative people to run out of energy and inspiration when doing an ultra-big project, and 2) maybe the sheer scale (of a novel, big painting, movie) tends to make creative puff up in ways that are artistically unfortunate. Maybe they tend to get self-important when facing such challenges, or maybe they get depressed. Neither one is, generally, a good thing where the quality of the end product is concerned. And all of which may mean that -- despite the kind of zing that commercial demands and pressures can give a work --movies, novels, operas, and great big paintings tend to flop more often than more modestly-scaled works do. People just run out of energy, or find themselves unable to keep the project under artistic management.
* Artists' preferences. A lot of novels, for instance, are really story ideas that have been blown up beyond what they deserve or need to be because the market likes and demands novel-length fiction more than story-length fiction. (It's pretty widely-acknowledged in the bookbiz that many novels are padded-out stories. Sad fact of life: Americans like fat books, but with a lot of white space and short chapters. They want it easy, but they want it big. Comparisons to convenience foods are expected here ...) I know a fair number of fiction writers, and many of them would agree that most fiction ideas play themselves out most naturally at somewhere between 20 and 120 pages in length. That's a human kind of scale. Yet it's next to impossible to sell such creations. So, 90% of the time, a lot of stretching and bulking goes on.
* In the case of novels, one thing more people could give a little more thought to is how arbitrary the book-length thing is. A book is just a container for content, after all. Why should a piece of fiction just happen to fill such a thing up? It's funny: a matter of physical convenience has kinda defined an art form. Books often happen to be around 300 pages long -- how ... well, coincidental that novels do too! But is 300 pages really what you want from fiction? Or what the writer would really like to write?
I dunno. In any case, isn't it generally better that an art-idea be given its optimum expression and not any other, whatever that happens to mean scale-wise in the specific case?
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Jan 18, 2006 2:39:05 PM
Warhol did all this society portraits in only one size (the ones in which he took photos of NY's fashionable people--artists, rich society ladies, etc.) because he expected to display them all in a show at a museum. Some clients wanted theirs bigger or smaller but he didn't relent. He didn't get to display them, eventually.
Re: songs, Led Zeppelin's Dazed and Confused is much better as a 18 minutes 34 seconds live performance than the original vinyl version (around 4 minutes)... I guess you're right in that certain ideas work best in certain formats.
Between this and the client request, you don't have much room for optimisations of income ;-)
Posted by: Gabriel Mihalache at Jan 18, 2006 3:05:54 PM
Regarding choice of medium, if the most popular medium began to be populated by a preponderance of 'also-rans' wouldn't better artists seek a more obscure medium to separate themselves from the pack, i.e. "The Gates" in Central Park, and countless indie rock acts whose songs often meander for minutes before coming to an end (Broken Social Scene and Animal Collective come to mind)often to critical if not commercial success?
Posted by: Mike at Jan 18, 2006 3:31:13 PM
The average - take your pick: mean, median, mode - 3 minute song is trash, and as been since the Beatles broke up. It certainly depends on the genre, but I would suggest the current optimum is closer to 4.5 minutes. Furthermore, when an artist that typically does shorter songs does a longer one, it is often truly excellent.
...but I like metal, electronic and , pop fans (for shame!) may have different standards.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at Jan 18, 2006 3:38:13 PM
Continuing the example of the 78 rpm record above, the "optimal" length of songs/movies is surely artificial. The 3 minute song is an artifact of LP technology as well as radio preference, and the 2 hour movie is based on theatre wishes to show 3 shows during a given evening. In other creative works without such historical paths, we see no such trend. Popular books range from Twain's 200 to Tolstoy's 1000, videogames range in length from 5 hours to 100 hours to "infinite" (i.e., Tetris). I see no reason to believe that 3 minutes is a more aesthetically pleasing song length.
Posted by: Kevin Bryan at Jan 18, 2006 3:46:53 PM
1. Tetris is not infinite in length. A 3 minute song on a continuous loop is also not infinite in length.
2. Painting sizes are price discrimination. Richer people have larger walls to cover. Less wealthy art lovers are limited by their wall space.
3. The box-office to DVD shift might be the reason behind the increase in the # of 3 hour movies, and big-name directors like Peter Jackson aren't the only ones making extra-long movies. I don't mind buying 3 hour long DVD's, because I routinely split my watching of even 2 hour DVD's over multiple nights. I am however much less likely to watch 3 hour movies in the theater. (Did I mention I have a 7 month old?)
Posted by: DK at Jan 18, 2006 4:52:10 PM
Fans of the group Yes would beg to differ in the "shorter is better" song department! Some of the groups best works are 10-20 minutes long.
I think that "long" literature and movies have the potential to be "better" than "shorter" works, because longer works allow the author/producer to draw the consumer deeper into the story. Lord of the Rings is the best example that I can think of.
That being said, a great short story is priceless.
Posted by: Doug at Jan 18, 2006 5:06:08 PM
Josh: One reason must be that a rectangle is the easiest shape to make a frame for.
Tyler: Don't forget that artistic ideas are re-useable! If an artist paints an idea on a small canvas, there's no reason he can't paint it again (or the version of it suitable for a large canvas) on a large canvas, later.
(The example that comes to mind is Von Stuck's "Die Sunde", which he painted probably a dozen times - though I don't know that the size varied, and I believe the real market force there was the nudity of the subject, but the principle is sound; the first iteration of an idea does not exhaust it, and later ones may refine or improve the original. Of course, the opposite may happen as well...)
Posted by: Sigivald at Jan 18, 2006 5:39:43 PM
In terms of stories, a great number of "long" works are actually several short works stuck together. The first example I can think of is "Pulp Fiction", which is a couple of short stories, in which the main characters from one story are the bit characters in the other.
This is quite common, and a reasonable solution to fitting short stories to the novel or movie format without excessive padding.
Posted by: Patrick at Jan 18, 2006 6:57:21 PM
This doesn't necessarily make sense. One never really knows what particular painting will sell or not sell. Maybe you pick wrong, regardless of your personal favoring of this painting or that. There is no doubt that many painters only paint very large paintings to TRY sell for a lot of money. However, smaller paintings do sell better because they cost less, are easier to ship, handle, frame, insure, etc.
Most painters choose a particular sized canvas based upon how much detail and stuff (figures, objects in a still life, objects in a landscape) will be in their composition, with more detail requiring a larger canvas to paint it well. In the absence of having to paint to fill the size of an altarpiece or high ceilinged rooms, most painters will choose a size that is easy to paint while standing in front of a standard easel, i.e. MAX dimension about 48-60" (4-5ft).
Posted by: btm at Jan 18, 2006 7:17:47 PM
Interesting topic.
As someone who paints (sort of), bigger tends to be better in my experience. Most of my art work is figurative, and I find I can experience dimension better ... finesse details more precisely ... create "atmosphere" more easily when I work larger.
Some of the stuff I do has a symbolic aspect to it. In the case of symbols or similar motifs, smaller scale surfaces work well.
So for me it depends pretty much on the subject matter.
My daughter is a much better painter than I am, and came through a fine arts program. She is always saying she wants to "go bigger" and seems to hanker after the freedom that comes with the larger canvas.
As far as appreciation goes, yes I prefer large and spectacular works. I remember going to an exhibition in Belfast, N. Ireland that featured the figuarative paintings of Jack B. Yeats ( brother of the poet W.B.Yeats).
Some of his canvases were huge and most presented a drama, painted in an oddly sketchy style. It was a bit like going to the theater.
A personal favorite of mine is Gustav Klimt, and some of his large works are really impressive.
It can be odd going from an art book with illustrations, to seeing the real McCoy in the gallery. I was hugely impressed at one time with illustrations of certain paintings by Pablo Picasso. However when I saw some of these in a gallery I was disappointed. Most were smaller than I imagined, and lacked the impact I assumed they would possess.
Posted by: Aidan Maconachy at Jan 18, 2006 11:49:07 PM
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was one of the best-selling artists in late 19th century England, and often worked on 1' x 1' or 1' x 2' foot canvases. Of course, that was when skill, craft, precision in detail and fine brush-work were still valued among collectors.
There is no "correct" song length. Wagner, Webern, the Ramones, Can, Miles Davis:It is simply not a value for music generally, save perhaps in very specific venues. I would not want Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" to be three minutes long.
Posted by: bob mcmanus at Jan 19, 2006 12:12:47 AM
Books: In science fiction, anyway, there is an old trend of expanding award-winning short works to make novels. And in every case where I've read both, the short version was clearly better. (Note that's expanding one story rather than combining several shorter stories to reach book length, which is a strategy which frequently works very well.)
Songs: I'm surprised but after poking around my MP3 collection, it looks like the ideal length for a song for me is somewhere in the 3:40-4:00 range. I do have quite a few that are longer -- lately I've been listening a lot to a new 15 minute long musical version of the poem Tam O Shanter -- but I've got to admit that in my heart of hearts, the ones over 5 minutes last longer than I'd prefer. (I note that Ian Anderson has written some real gems that come in around the 1:30-2:00 mark.)
None of this applies to tunes or other instrumental works, though!
Posted by: Sol at Jan 19, 2006 8:16:05 AM
