Category: The Arts

Seventeen years of research, beginning in Germany, have led the Adelaide historian Maike Vogt- Luerssen to believe that the Mona Lisa is the lovesick former Duchess of Milan, Isabella of Aragon, and not the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, as has been believed.

And why is she so sad?

She married at the end of 1488 when she came to Milan but she had a big problem. She married her cousin, a beautiful man but he was a drinker, and he had problems with impotence.”

The Isabella alternative has long been known to art historians, now the evidence in its favor has gone up. Here is the full story, which includes a discussion of the evidence. Here is a recent article which offers a scientific explanation of the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile.

One of the largest and best-ever exhibits of Haitian art will be opening this week at the Organization of American States, 17th and Constitution Ave., Washington D.C. The showing is part of a more general celebration of the Haitian Bicentennial. I am pleased to announce I will have eight pieces in the show. In addition to the voodoo flags, and a number of paintings, look for the bearded plastic doll on the horse, trampling two bound babies, and wrapped in sequins and jewels (not a joke!). Opening night is Monday, 6 p.m. (invitations required), after that the exhibit is open regular business hours, but not weekends. The show closes July 9th, make it if you can!

One reader wrote me the following:

…artists who put works into the pool are depositing them at full value, tax free, right? If they instead sold these works, they’d lose 50% to a gallery and then another 50% (the marginal tax rate of any minimally successful self-employed person, even me) to Uncle Sam etc. In other words, if they sold art and invested the cash they’d only have 25 cents on the dollar to put into stocks and bonds. The question is whether any money manager could overcome this enormous handicap.

Besides, most artists tend to have more works than they can sell into such an inefficient market. For this and the reasons above, the cost of contributing to this fund may be close to zero for all but the most wildly successful participants.

What does it cost to set an art work aside?

Let’s say that the art trust can store the work at the same cost as a gallery. Then the artist already has done all the storing that he or she wants to do. Storing more works, all other things equal, is a cost rather than a benefit. And tax must be paid once the works are sold, in any case. Furthermore, when it comes time to sell the works and get the best price possible, the trust is no more effective than a gallery, and arguably less so. In fact the trust might resort to a gallery or auction house in any case, simply postponing the selling costs.

Perhaps the artist has pictures that he cannot sell at all. Why not put them into the trust? Fair enough, but if no gallery will take these pictures, how can the trust make them profitable?

The deal makes the most sense when an artist currently has an exclusive dealing agreement with a gallery. Such an artist might prefer to siphon off works to other channels, as a form of price discrimination, but is not allowed to. The sponsoring gallery does not want its market to be ruined. The trust might allow the artist to achieve market segmentation without it being labeled as such.

Nonetheless the artist pays a price for this new outlet. You have to accept a risk position in the pictures of others. Furthermore this price discrimination motive suggests that each artist will be putting his lesser pictures into the trust. You don’t want to “shade price” on your very finest pictures.

Another reader wrote:

I’m not persuaded that the art trust wouldn’t be an effective model. It doesn’t seem a lot different than the risk dilution idea of a blackjack team or the cross-trading that goes on between friends in a large poker tournament.

Again, a very good point. But you wish to share risk in this fashion when you know that you (and your team) can beat the market. In this case you are confident but want protection against bad luck. If you felt that the artists in the pool were all above-average, relative to their current prices, you might find the trust attractive. This would require each artist to judge the other artworks in the pool, which involves high information costs.

Perhaps the trust helps solve a “durable goods monopolist game.” That is, the artist wishes to precommit not to sell works in the near future. Buyers may be afraid that if they buy today, the price will be lower tomorrow. Perhaps the trust can take works off the market more effectively than a gallery can. This would provide some argument for the trust. But of course the artist must also prove to buyers that he has locked up his future output to the requisite degree; this may prove difficult.

A final issue is one of trust in the intermediary. Life insurance, or savings banks (pre-deposit insurance), promise to pay you back in a distant future. Virtually all depositors or policyholders have preferred large, solid institutions with high levels of capitalization. Older banks had fancy columns to signal they will be around for the long run. Otherwise there is simply too much risk that a small intermediary will go under. If you are “lending” a painting to an artistic venture, why not look for the most conservative and thickly capitalized institution possible?

In closing, I will repeat my bottom line from my previous post on the topic:

…decompose the transaction. Half of your income stream remains tied up in your own art and thus risky, minus the twenty percent of course. With the other half of your pension you decide to invest in not-yet-totally-famous artists. Would anyone recommend such purchases on their own merits? Is that your idea of insurance?

That being said, it is the market, not I, who will have the final word in this matter.

Fabio points out that good copies of masterworks are very cheap, a fraction of the value of the original. Charles Murray make a similar point:

The technology already exists to make perfect, full-size (or any size) copies of any painting–“perfect” meaning not only absolutely accurate color values and reproductions of line, but the same kind of canvas or plaster, the same three-dimensional ridges and textures in the brush strokes, the same sheen to the varnish, and even the same cracks in the varnish, if so desired. “Perfect” means also that the most acute and best-trained artistic eye in the world would have only a 50-50 chance of picking the original over the copy.

He exaggerates the state of technology but the point remains nonetheless: what if paintings were like recorded music?

Murray continues:

Economically, I assume that the acceptance of copies would devastate the resale value of originals of everything except the first-tier work. But for the first-tier work–the owners of which would have the exclusive right to reproduce it–the amount of money to be made selling copies might well rival current market value.

It is also fun to speculate on which paintings would sell the most copies if only the intrinsic attractiveness of the art mattered. Would the market be comparatively small, on the scale of the audience for classical music? Or would great art attract a mass market? In a world where the price of the painting is not going to impress houseguests, which paintings would be used for interior decoration, and which would be the ones that ordinary people, having become collectors, would put in their private galleries for measured contemplation? How would the works of Titian and Caravaggio fare against Monet and Renoir? How would the early Picasso–the easy-to-enjoy Picasso of “Boy with a Pipe”–fare against the later Picasso?

The most exciting prospect is what low-cost perfect copies would do to visual art as part of our daily lives. As matters stand, great art is something most of us see a few times a year, if that, having no choice but to move quickly from work to work, wondering if we will be able to get to the Impressionists before our feet hurt too much to enjoy them.

My prediction: Contra Fabio and Murray, I think most people would find it oppressive to live with “great art,” as that concept is traditionally understood. They prefer the inferior rendition. They like the ¤¤¤¤ they put on their walls. So there is less of a mass market here than meets the eye. A separate question is whether museums will license their works for such reproductions. If museums could make real money through this route, would they continue to receive charitable donations and government grants? The commercialization of high art would completely redefine the question of who controls an art museum. It is not obvious that this would benefit current museum management.

Take 250 reasonably well-known artists and put their work together in a trust. Later the works will be sold. The payoff to each artist comes half from his paintings, half from the other paintings in the lot. The intermediary takes a mere twenty percent, plus it charges the artists half the costs of storage.

It is a retirement program for artists; supposedly it will minimize their risk and encourage creativity.

I can think of at least five reasons why it won’t work. To see just one, decompose the transaction. Half of your income stream remains tied up in your own art and thus risky, minus the twenty percent of course. With the other half of your pension you decide to invest in not-yet-totally-famous artists. Would anyone recommend such purchases on their own merits? Is that your idea of insurance?

Here is their web site. Here is the home page of the founder, Dan Galai; he has a prolific publication record in economics journals. For more information, see the May 29 issue of The Economist, p.75.

The Tate Museum, in London, has found a sponsor for its toilet paper. Here is the story. And here are some Penn State U. prices, just in case you wish to have a locker room ($50,000) or synthetic grass playing field ($250,000) named after you.

You might think that the labor supply of the dead is fairly inelastic. Well, it is not so simple as meets the eye:

These days, the icon of Renaissance art is Florence’s greatest single brand and the global Michelangelo market is booming. You might imagine that as the years go by, the chances of finding a long-lost Michelangelo would shrink. But no. As one expert has observed, as the price tag on the world’s greatest artists keeps soaring, so, miraculously, more hidden Michelangelo gems keep being discovered.

There is more:

According to Wallace, the rate at which Michelangelo finds are turning up – including documents, drawings, and even a candlestick – has gone from one every two years a century ago to two a year on average from 1996 onwards. In the past year, he observes, three finds have been attributed to Michelangelo, most recently a small wooden statue of Christ, which went on display at the Horne museum in Florence earlier this month.

Now here is the clincher:

Some of the most highly publicised finds have subsequently “been shot down in flames” as they fail to withstand the scrutiny of the world’s experts, says Timothy Clifford, Michelangelo expert and director of National Galleries of Scotland.

Here is the full story. Most Renaissance artists did a wide variety of anonymous small commissions, especially in their early years. So there probably are “unknown Michelangelos” out there; it is less clear that we will ever know what came from his hand.

Many of the results are not surprising. Light colors sell better than dark colors, happy portrait subjects sell better than widows, and horizontal pictures are easier to hang over the fireplace. Here are a few other points of note:

1. Landscapes can as much as triple in value when there are horses or figures in the foreground. Evidence of industry usually lowers a picture’s value.

2. A still life with flowers is worth more than one with fruit. Roses stand at the top of the flower hierarchy, chrysanthemums and lupins (seen as working class) stand at the bottom.

3. There is a hierarchy for animals as well. Purebred dogs help a picture more than mongrels do. Spaniels are worth more than collies. Racehorses are worth more than carthorses. When it comes to gamebirds, the following rule of thumb holds. The more expensive it is to shoot the bird, the more it adds to the value of a painting. A grouse is worth more than a mallard, and you had better show the animal from the front, not the back.

4. Water adds value to a picture, but only if it is calm. Shipwrecks are a no-no.

5. Round and oval works are extremely unpopular with buyers.

6. A Boucher nude sketch of a woman can be worth ten times more than a comparable sketch of a man.

The bottom line: Buyers prefer artworks which in some manner reflect high status.

For the full story, see “Why some Pictures Go For More Than Others,” in the May 2004 issue of The Art Newspaper.

New book, 233 pages, quite dull, no economics. French of course. More here.

The Picasso last night went for $104 million, buyer’s premium included. The winning bidder was anonymous.

The higher the wage rate, the more valuable is time. Some people will use their greater wealth to consume more leisure, others will run around and look harried.

Surely the arts should adapt to serve this second category of customer. We are all familiar with channel-surfing, or the two-minute pop song, but how about “high culture” in bite-sized portions?

“There’s no hard and fast reason why an opera has to be colossal or epic in scale,” says director David Pountney. “An opera is simply a narrative idea expressed through music. Length is immaterial – I have seen several successful operas that are barely 10 minutes long.”

In fact, 10 minutes sounds Wagnerian in comparison with Peter Reynolds’s Sands of Time. At three minutes and 34 seconds, it is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s shortest opera. “The librettist, Simon Rees, came up with the idea of an opera whose duration should match the boiling of an egg,” says Reynolds. “So we created a domestic scenario of a couple having an argument over breakfast. It starts with the sand-timer being turned, and ends with the egg coming out of the saucepan.” [I’ve added the link to this quotation]

Then there is always Samuel Beckett:

…the shortest of all Beckett works, the notoriously ephemeral Breath, consists of a set of printed instructions that take longer to read than to perform. Richard Gregory, of the company Quarantine, recently produced the work at Newcastle Playhouse, and came up with an ingenious solution for extending its 30-second duration. They did it twice. “I think we spent about a fortnight, all told, preparing a piece that was over in under a minute,” says Gregory.

And here is a nice short (truly short) story:

Augusto Monterroso’s El Dinosaurio reads in its entirety: “Upon waking the dinosaur was still there.”

Addendum: If your tastes run in the other direction, here is a version of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, slowed to down to last twenty-four hours. And go to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, where you can see Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho”, the classic Hitchcock movie but at much slower speed.

The ever-insightful David Nishimura asks why museums are so strongly discouraged from selling works in their inventories. I have seen (informal) estimates that U.S. museums display no more than five percent of their collections over a few years. Nishimura asks:

In fact, museums often end up with stuff that they cannot exhibit or that is of little or no relevance to what they are all about (it’s not only relatives who end up receiving gifts that are better intentioned than chosen!). Storage space is another issue, as is the cost of insurance.

Museums also evolve over time. Nearly all older American museums, for example, started out with collections of European paintings of decidedly mediocre quality. Skip forward a few generations, and those museums’ galleries are at an entirely different level — the legacy of wealthy patrons, vastly improved connoisseurship, and the dispersal of so many old European collections. And so what was once exemplary is now the stuff sold in bulk by third-rank auction houses. Is it so bad that such works be sold off, especially if the proceeds can be used to acquire better items not well represented in the collection?

In practice, museum directors who “deaccession” artworks come under heavy criticism. Why? Here is where a very crude theory, too crude to possibly be true, comes in.

Stop thinking of visitors as the museum’s customers. Instead the customers are the donors. Donating a picture is like spending money. The donor gives a Picasso to MOMA, in return purchasing the feeling of “having given a Picasso to MOMA.” This yields tax, networking, and other privileges in this life, as well as a long-term legacy. Museums, in turn, take some care to attract viewers, so that their real customers — the donors — have greater feelings of satisfaction about the whole enterprise.

In this “model,” selling off artworks makes customers (donors) nervous. “How do I know they won’t sell off my [sic] Picasso once I’ve died?” It is only a slight reassurance to respond: “We only sell off the second-rate pictures in our inventory.” So museums sit on their huge and growing stashes of art. In this manner they signal their trustworthiness to future donors.

Under some assumptions this outcome is roughly efficient. Donating a picture to a vault is how that donor wishes to “spend” her resources. The donor may self-deceive into thinking that the donated work is a masterpiece. By the time the truth is revealed, she has passed away. Subsequently selling the work to a museum in Topeka would damage future donors more than it would benefit Kansas viewers. The museum community, of course, does not like to admit that its donors are the primary customers (how would viewers and government funders feel?), so it must present other reasons why deaccessioning is bad. At the same time the museum faces a “time consistency” problem, and would like nothing more than to sell off its dross.

The policy bottom line: Government funding eases museum needs for funds, and makes it easier for museums to keep pictures in vaults. The funding subsidizes the legacies of dead donors, eases time consistency problems for future donors, and limits the real supply of art, to the detriment of viewers. That’s just in this fantasy model of course, not in the real world.