Relationships between artistic movements and careers of modern artists: evidence from hedonic regressions with auction data

Abstract

The now-substantial literature on the career age-valuation profiles of artists has paid limited attention to the effects on the profiles of association with artistic movements. There are nonetheless many reasons why association with a more or less well-defined movement can be important for the career dynamic of an artist. The relation between careers and movement association has been studied by Accominotti (Poetics 37:267–294, 2009), who works with data on numbers of reproductions in art history books. The hedonic analysis of auction data in this area is limited, with results of regressions of pooled groups of artists being reported, for example, by Hellmanzik (Journal of Cultural Economics 33:201–232, 2009) and Hodgson (Journal of Cultural Economics 35:287–308, 2011). We undertake a hedonic regression analysis using a large data set on recent auction prices for nearly 300 important modern painters. We focus on the possible contribution to career creativity profiles of movement association in the context of pooled regressions where movement-specific effects are included in addition to pooled age effects, for such major movements as Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop Art. We also consider the effects of association with different categories of movements, whether artist-defined or critic- or historian-defined. In order to gauge the degree of intra-movement heterogeneity in creativity profiles, we also estimate a specification in which individual-artist profiles are added.