A0326
Title: The relationship between artistic movements and artist careers: Evidence from individual-level hedonic regression
Authors: Douglas Hodgson - UQAM (Canada) [presenting]
John Galbraith - McGill University (Canada)
Christiane Hellmanzik - Technical University of Dortmund (Germany)
Abstract: The literature on age-valuation profiles of artists has paid limited attention to the effects of membership in artistic movements. There are many reasons why membership in a movement can be important for the career dynamic of an artist. The relation between careers and movement membership has been previously studied by considering 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. Ideally, one would like to estimate individual-artist profiles relating valuation to date of production, and compare these with pooled profiles estimated for groups or movements to which the artists belong, to assess the relation between individual- and group-level price dynamics. Until recently, such an endeavour was rendered difficult by the small number of observations, compared to a large number of hedonic covariates, often available at the individual-artist level. But the successful application to this problem of recent dimensionality-reduction and model-averaging methods in the context of estimating individual age-valuation profiles suggests the utility of applying the same approach to estimating individual profiles in the context of movement membership. We thus apply these methods to a large data set on auction prices for major modern painters.
