Tyler Cowen links to a news article about David Galenson, an economist who is “convinced that the type of economic analysis that explains the $4-plus gas at the pump can also explain the greatest artists of the last 100 or so years.” I assume that this line about gas prices is just something that the reporter added: at least, the factors that explain gas prices seem much different than the factors that explain great art.
The article continues to say that his “statistical approach . . . is based in part on how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.” That sounds cool to me. I’d also like to see some cross-time analysis, since it seems to me that an analysis of textbooks would also be measuring what’s currently trendy in art history. The article says that he analyzes 33 textbooks published between 1990 and 2005; I don’t know if that’s long enough to get enough variation in trendiness. But he should give it a try and not just lump all the years together.
Galenson then says, “Quantification has been almost totally absent from art history. Art historians hate markets.” Whoa! How did he jump from “quantification” to “markets”? It sounds like he’s limiting himself if he doesn’t also apply quantitative methods to non-market situations.
Continuing, Galenson writes, “Important artists are innovators whose work changes the practices of their successors. The greater the changes, the greater the artist.” Who says this sort of thing? Is this a way that art historians talk? It sounds like circular reasoning: it’s his personal definition of “greatness.”
The article then quotes art professor Michael Rushton as saying that in science or art, he said, “innovation really requires a market.” Huh? Wha?? Tell that to my friend Seth, who spent 10 years self-experimentation. Heck, tell that to the cave painters. Or check out the American Visionary Art Museum.
It’s so frustrating: I think much can be learned from quantitative study of just about everything, but why do people have to overreach and say such silly things?
P.S. Galenson’s work on the trajectories of artists’ work by age looks interesting. I’m reminded of Dick De Veaux’s statement, “Math is like music, statistics is like literature“: Why are there no six year old novelists? Statistics, like literature, benefits from some life experience.
How about "The silly things that economists say when they think the social world is fully described by economics"? I mean, is it just me, or are economists the only social scientists that are so reductionist as this?
(It's bad enough that we have to de-train our students from constantly referring to statistics as "econometrics"…).
I think that what the econophys crowd misses is that they are still working phenomenology. They'll say 'statistical' and mean 'objects of [art|desire] are particles in the dispersive medium of people, imparted with momentum that we can observe and …' and be very happy with that. They can backwards chain their conclusions.
What they ignore is that they don't have an underlying space that describes [objects of some aesthetic desire] in an orderly way. So the topology of maps from objects to effects is, uhh, idiosynchratic.
Edward Tufte has some trenchant comments on Galenson's work on art prices <a>here
@Prison Rodeo: Econometrics is statistics applied to and constrained by economic models, a subset, not a renaming, of statistics…
Cheers,
JCS
Yeah, exactly — your mention of me. I completely agree. Hobbyists were/are innovators; and I think hobby-like activities preceded trading. I think the opposite of his statement is more correct: Markets require innovation. Innovation and specialization got together and without specialization there isn't anything to trade.
Prison, David:
I don't have any problem with these guys quantifying everything under the sun. That's what I do too. But "innovation really requires a market"? How could otherwise intelligent people (as, I assume, they are) say things like that? I'm simply baffled.
I think you guys may be being to hard on the guy. Without a market of one form or the other an innovation is merely a curiosity.
Economist also I think have a much wider definition of market than most.
I'm all for phenomenology, and quantifying things. You have to do that before you can really determine the dynamics of a system.
This comment from Galenson's website is the kind of stuff that makes me cringe:
After a decade of number crunching, Galenson, at the not-so-tender age of 55,
has fashioned something audacious and controversial: a unified field theory of creativity.
Having looked at his site, I should probably read his book. I'm not very hopeful that he addresses the questions that I have [he's got this whole cult-of-personality thing going].
I think that the comment about innovation needing a market is just a rehash of, "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a noise?". Marginal innovations are enabled by market mechanisms [so, I think whoever wrote that had an implicit assumption about the scale of 'innovation'], where revolutionary innovation enables new [and newfangled] markets [viz, Ed Witten; string theory might not be right, but every time he writes a paper, 100 postdocs shout in glee].
If 16 years isn't enough time to allow for the effects of "trendiness", and I agree it isn't, might we also agree that it isn't enough time to really be representative of very much at all?
The article says:
'Michael Rushton, who teaches the economics of art at Indiana University, said that Mr. Galenson was on to something; in science or art, he said, “innovation really requires a market.”'
To me that sounds like he's a professor of economics, not art.
I don't think we can judge the guy by reading a NYT article. He may sound silly, but how can we know where he really stands versus what the reporter lets us see? I'd like to say we're justified to be suspicious enough to go look at his work, and then examine his arguments.
In terms of his statement:
"Important artists are innovators whose work changes the practices of their successors. The greater the changes, the greater the artist."
My understanding from reading his paper is that he takes his illustration count metric very seriously, and is the source of is "greater the artist claim". So the quoted statement is tantamount to:
The greater the changes caused by an artist,the more illustrations the artist will have in art books.
16 years isnt enough time for a trend. Neither is 150, 10,000 years or even 400,000 years when the planet is 4 BILLION years old.
That is why we dont believe in global warming. 150 years of weather data says NOTHING.