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Portrait of David Galenson
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 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.
Here is the full profile. Here are previous MR posts on David Galenson. Here is Galenson's home page.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 4, 2008 at 12:16 PM in The Arts | Permalink
Comments
In Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray used essentially the same metric (textbook page share) to rank the achievements of artists and also scientists, inventors, writers and philosophers.
Posted by: Richard Squire at Aug 4, 2008 1:07:22 PM
And here is Felix Salmon telling you why Galenson's methodology is suspect: it overrepresents one-hit wonders.
Posted by: at Aug 4, 2008 1:16:44 PM
How has Galenson come up with a "radically new interpretation of 20th-century art" when #1 is a picture so famous that the heroine in "Titanic" owns it?
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Aug 4, 2008 1:32:11 PM
Impressionism and It's Canon by James Cutting is a deep statistical analysis of canon formation based on data from art textbooks, gallery & dealers, museums, collectors, early historians etc that tries to show why a very small number of works out of those painted dominate the discourse.
If a great work was unavailable (or difficult to see) for viewing it rarely got mentioned. On the other hand, it a work was on public display before 1910, it became a masterpiece.
Galenson's should not be trusted unless he seriously took Cutting's study into account.
Posted by: bob mcmanus at Aug 4, 2008 2:10:29 PM
The crucial point is that art history is a story, written in this form: X influenced Y who influenced Z.
So, if painting A is on display in the Louvre and painting B is hung in a reclusive billionaire's bedroom, painting A is going to be more influential on subsequent painters. So it will be more part of the story of art history.
This is analogous to the history of golf course architecture, where the courses that host the major championships are much more influential than ones that don't. Thus, over the last 75 years, Augusta National, host of the Masters, has had more influence on art of golf course design than, say, the National Golf Links of America, which hasn't hosted a big tournament since 1922. The NGLA is a great, great golf course, but it's never on TV and you have to know a member to visit it.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Aug 4, 2008 2:47:59 PM
"Eighteen artists is only 7% of the 246 painters
found in these tomes, but the works of these 18 also represented 83% of all im-
ages in these texts. Two tallies are shown in the table—the number of books in
which each painter had images, and the percentage of all images in the books
that were by these painters. This latter value is normalized for the 18 repre-
sented; that is, percentages add to 100%, leaving out the widely scattered im-
ages by over two hundred other artists." ...Cutting
Cutting uses Zipf's law a lot. Cutting also built a database of artworks on websites.
The post uses the word "greatest." If instead we are talking "important" or "influential" Galenson might have a better case, but then we are no longer talking about art but sociology and psychology. For those who aren't fans of Joyce, is Ulysses the greatest 20th century novel? If not, why do so many people say so? It might not have much to do with the merits of the book, or even how influential it was.
Posted by: bob mcmanus at Aug 4, 2008 3:03:10 PM
There are worse ways to evaluate art work. One of the worse ways is throwing up your hands and saying evaluating art work can't be done.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Aug 4, 2008 3:43:22 PM
“Spiral Jetty,” a gigantic earthwork coil that Robert Smithson planted in the Great Salt Lake in Utah 1970, came in third ...
Oh, well. Back to the old drawing board.
Posted by: Anderson at Aug 4, 2008 4:21:18 PM
The opinion of Elderfield seems spot on: interesting, but hardly the whole picture. The opinion "I don’t buy that there is a difference between artistic and economic value." seems to be one of a person who doesn't like paintings, sculpture (or even books, if market value and quality of the writing are the same thing according to this guy).
Posted by: lb at Aug 4, 2008 4:33:57 PM
One thing I think is important is to try and separate out the cost of materials and craft from the cost of the work. For The Love of God would be phenomenally expensive if it's parts were just piled on the ground. It is trickier than one might think.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Aug 4, 2008 4:53:32 PM
Why limit this method to art? Using Google as a meta-bibliography, I have determined that the twinkie is greater than the cannoli.
Posted by: Steve R at Aug 4, 2008 4:56:47 PM
I long for the day when Googlefight.com is accepted as a legitimate measure of worth.
Then again, maybe it's right sometimes:
http://xkcd.com/458/
Posted by: Matt at Aug 4, 2008 5:35:29 PM
Once upon a time the venerable Consumer Reports rated the national parks, giving each a numerical score (I am not making this up!). If my memory is correct, Everglades National Park came out two points behind Glacier Bay National Park. And so on. It took me a while to realize they were serious -at first I thought it was just a self-parody.
Other than the fact that it is very clear that the art of the Twentieth Century is totally insignificant in comparison with that of the previous seven centuries or so, we are too close to it to say anything very interesting.
Posted by: at Aug 4, 2008 6:10:57 PM
Why limit the system to images, which as people have noted are prone to all sorts of distortion effects, even in textbooks?
Why not use verbal references to works instead? One could elaborate further, insofar as verbal references exist in word-proximity to each other, by creating a graph of relationships between works (decree that consecutively mentioned works are "related" in some fashion). From this, one could find the most central works. Then use a minimum sampling approach to find the nth greatest works, etc....
Posted by: Alistair Morley at Aug 4, 2008 6:15:07 PM
One of the problems is the fact that art history text book editors/authors choose the closest example they can get. That is to say, the Art Institute of Chicago collection is overrepresented in Gardner's Art Through the Ages or was until about 3 editions ago (Helen Gardner taught there); Janson was all Met all the time; Honour and Fleming, British Museum and National Gallery.
Posted by: Michael Tinkler at Aug 4, 2008 6:27:04 PM
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Mark Twain
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Benjamin Disraeli
Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
George Bernard Shaw
Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
Mark Twain
An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing
Oscar Wilde (with a slight change of economist for a cynic)
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
Jean Baudrillard
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
Rita Mae Brown
I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.
George Canning
Statistics are no substitute for judgment.
Henry Clay
It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
Fletcher Knebel
gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.
—J.R. "Bob" Dobbs (virtual figurehead of The Church of Subgenius)
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
—Mark Twain/Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910) quoted by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
If you want to inspire confidence, give
plenty of statistics. It does not matter
that they should be accurate, or even intelligible,
as long as there is enough of them.
?Lewis Carroll
Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.
Evan Esar (1899 - 1995), Esar's Comic Dictionary
A fool must now and then be right, by chance.
......
Michael Gordon, AKA, the buggy professor http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org
Posted by: michael gordon at Aug 4, 2008 7:12:27 PM
Well, at least Galenson has determined which works were most fashionable among textbook authors between 1990 and 2005.
Incidentally, my Google search on the phrase "jump the shark" just fetched 720,000 results. Congratulations to David Galenson for provoking this comment, which will make him #720,001.
Posted by: JoeV at Aug 4, 2008 11:49:00 PM
Another bias may well be available space within the publication. If you had to reproduce the Guernica (arguably superior to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) you would need an entire page, maybe two to do it justice. You can place Les Demoiselles in just a quarter of a page and be content.
Posted by: luz at Aug 5, 2008 11:39:27 AM
Why don't we ask Deidre McCloskey for her take on Galenson.
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