Abstract
Age-valuation profiles for artists’ works are to some degree analogous to age-earnings profiles for workers more generally and are of interest for valuation of art objects as well as for what they reveal about artists’ career dynamics. A number of writers have suggested that the school, or style, characterizing an artist’s work may have implications for the peak of the age-valuation profile (the age of the artist at the time at which his or her most highly valued works were executed). In particular, shifts of style which change the relative valuation of innovation and originality, versus craftsmanship and experience, have been hypothesized. The second half of the eighteenth century provides an interesting potential test, because socioeconomic and political changes at this time were paralleled by revolutionary change in the fine arts, especially painting, witnessing major changes in subject manner and aesthetic style among prominent artists. We revisit the hypothesis using data on auction sales of works from this time, estimating hedonic age-valuation profiles using a novel data set. We pool our set of artists to estimate profiles for different birth cohorts, also using a specification where profiles shift continuously with year of birth. We also use dimension-reduction and model-averaging techniques to allow estimation of individual profiles for several artists, despite limited sample sizes.
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Notes
Greenberg (1993, p. 294).
While it is not the point of the present paper, it is worth noting that such individual-level regressions also have the potential to deliver more accurate predictions of the auction value of individual art works.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Jon Hamilton, Gwendolyn Owens, Tatevik Sekhposyan, the Editor and two referees, and participants in the Second North American Workshop on Cultural Economics (at the 2013 conference of the SEA), the 2013 conference of the Canadian Economics Association, the 2014 CIREQ-McGill colloquium and the 2014 International Conference of the ACEI, for valuable comments. We thank also the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC) for financial support of this research, and the Centre Interuniversitaire de recherche en analyse des organisations (CIRANO) for research facilities. Matthew Meland provided outstanding research assistance.
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Galbraith, J.W., Hodgson, D.J. Innovation, experience and artists’ age-valuation profiles: evidence from eighteenth-century rococo and neoclassical painters. J Cult Econ 39, 259–275 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-014-9231-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-014-9231-4
Keywords
- Age-valuation profile
- Art market
- Auction prices
- Dimension reduction
- Model averaging
- Neoclassical painting