Been looking at David Galenston’s two books - thinking I’ll purchase the latest book called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.   Got interested in David W. Galenson after reading a review of his ideas in the New York Times today.  

In The Art of Pricing Great Art, the writer, Mr. Leonhardt, expresses the following:

“The mysterious part of the current mania lies in figuring out what exactly makes a piece of art worth $30 million instead of, say, $1 million. Not even people who make their living selling art claim to have much of a definition of great art. In fact, they’re proud not to have one. “That’s where the market becomes magical,” Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, told me.”

In my www.webmetricsguru.com blog - I use with metrics to solve a business need (some times I make my own metrics - you have to be creative - you know); a theory explaining value of a work of art would appeal to someone with my values and way of thinking.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Leonhardt article so I’ll quote from it quite a bit, then comment at the end.

“…..he began collecting data on the sale price of works by Warhol, Jackson Pollock and other American artists, and he discovered a pattern. Most of them produced their most valuable work either very early in their career, like Warhol, or very late, like Pollock. When he expanded his research to European painters, he found the same pattern.

Not only that, but the two groups tended to approach art, and to talk about it, in strikingly different ways. The young geniuses, like Gauguin, Picasso and Van Gogh, were conceptual innovators whose paintings broke sharply from previous work. They typically had a precise goal in mind when they started a piece and didn’t need long to finish it. “Above all, don’t sweat over a painting,” Gauguin once told a friend. “A great sentiment can be rendered immediately.”

The late bloomers, on the other hand, arrived at their innovations gradually, through trial and error, making their major contributions late in life. They painted the same subject again and again, experimenting on the canvas, often reluctant to say that a painting was finished. Consider that Cézanne, who did his most valuable and celebrated work in his 60s, signed few of his paintings.

Mr. Galenson has extended the theory to novelists, poets and beyond, arguing that most creative people fall on one end or the other of the spectrum, and he has earned a fair bit of attention. Malcolm Gladwell, in a speech at Columbia University, described “Old Masters and Young Geniuses,” which Mr. Galenson published this year, as “a really wonderful book.” Wired magazine recently profiled him under the headline, “What Kind of Genius Are You?”

Maybe few artists are exactly one type or the other - I believe there is polarity in just about everything - including creativity.

“……If you look through the prices from the current auction season, or walk through any major museum, you can’t help but notice that Mr. Galenson is onto something. When a still life that Cézanne painted at the age of 56, for instance, fetched $37 million at Sotheby’s last week, art experts cited the rarity of Cézanne still lifes. The next night at Christie’s, another Cézanne still life — one painted when he was 34 — sold for just $1.1 million. “

I don’t find that surprising - Cezanne’s late still lifes are much more “unique” than his earlier work - when he was struggling to find himself and his style.  While Cezanne’s early work is notable - yet he had he not evolved his later style and revolutionized art.  Had Paul Cezanne painted his early still lifes, then died all of a sudden, before doing his later work - we’d probably not know he existed today - he’d never become that well known for his early work.

Now, it turns out that Malcolm Gladwell (the same Malcolm Gladwell who I heard at Webmasterworld Pubcon X in Boston, earlier this year) has come to Galenson’s defense and spoke about Galenson’s theory in February at Columbia.   I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Age Before Beauty all the way through and it’s great!

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There were 2 Andy Warhol openings at Gagosian Gallery tonight - I went to the first show and felt I had enough and did not need to see the second show. In fact, the Gagosian Gallery on W. 24th street was large enough to be a museum and had about 7 or 8 large rooms - all filled with Warhol’s late work.

Here’s some shots from the show - you can click on each to blow them up.

This last painting - the Last Supper - interesting to me in that Andy Warhol mixed in Dove and GE.

Here’s what I think - most of the Andy Warhol “paintings” are “process” and look OK if you don’t ask for anything more than what you see. Warhol is all process - if there’s any strugle - growth - insight - I don’t see it. I just see process. His process would not work for me - but he became his process.

Andy Warhol is more like a geneticist, taking the same thing and varying the arrangement, colors, etc. The work are produced in mass, in fact, the mass production of his work, prints, paintings - it was easy to fill to large galleries - but one was enough for me.

A lot of people were at the opening - some colorfully dressed - all types. I felt between this Andy Warhol show and the show at White Box tonight - I had had seen enought for one night and went home.