La Disputa

This week an interesting article appeared in the New York Times.

David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago, reduced the ranking of “influence” of an artwork into a simple formula: the frequency the piece appears in art history textbooks. He believes that there is nothing particularly special about the arts, he “[doesn't] buy that there is a difference between artistic and economic value.” By his theory, he ranks Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” as number one because it appears 28 times in art history books. Number two goes to The Monument to the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin with 25 appearences (what, you don’t know who that is?), and number three is the Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson (23 appearances in art history textbooks).

I was almost run aground with speechlessness by the end of this article. He seemed to confuse the popularity of a work with the “influentiality” of a work. If we are using quantitative methods to explore the “greatness” of a work, I’m almost surprised that his research was so narrow. Why didn’t he count how many times a particular artwork appeared in a catalogue/exhibited around the world? Or how many books were written about an art subject or an artist (surrealism would probably appear the winner, with Salvador Dali in the front line- while Galenson’s formula omits surrealism completely)? Or perhaps how many sentences were written with the word “influential” and the artwork’s name? Or even, just figuring out which artwork has fetched the biggest investments over the years (taking inflation into consideration, of course). His theory, instead, must conclude that textbooks are written without bias and are apolitical (was this guy raised in the same America I was?), and thusly he could make such an outlandish statement. He can ignore the fact that some textbooks emphasize women’s art and some concentrate on the history of a particular movement. Some art history books start with a later year for a specific class (I remember there were more modern art history classes than any other specific period – but that’s also because the term modern groups a lot of different movements together). He can neglect to realize that the people who choose the book (the professors) don’t buy it, and the people who buy the book (the students) don’t choose it. The textbook is a manual that demonstrates a sample of a certain movement in art history, it doesn’t always choose the “greatest” (whatever that is) work. As someone who majored in art history, I don’t remember any art history book claiming any artwork to be the greatest ever made.

Personally, I can believe that choosing the “greatest” artwork may not be completely subjective; there ARE a few works that can claim to be more influential than others, however, I’m pretty certain quantitative methods are not the way to do it. Or Ron Jeremy is the one of the greatest and most influential actors (because he had 986 movie roles).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Art Alert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.