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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Got to go to this show of Cimabue at the Frick Collection - it’s the kind of show you have to see.  The NYTimes review by Roberta Smith tells you all you need to know, here’s an excerpt:

“Cimabue (about 1240-1302) is one of the Big Three — with Duccio and Giotto — who laid the groundwork for the early Italian Renaissance. His name is as weighty as it is mysterious, partly because so few of his works survive. This tiny exhibition makes his greatness crystal clear. At its center are two small works newly attributed to him, “The Flagellation of Christ,” which the Frick acquired in 1950, and “The Virgin and Child Enthroned With Two Angels,” a recently discovered work that is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

I will try to make it over to the Frick Collection this weekend, or next week, if I can.

The Frick Collection is not someplace I go to often these days, but did when I was younger.

Seth Godin is the smartest marketer alive - and I always read his blog, most of the time commenting in Webmetricsguru.com; today my comment belongs in ArtNewYorkCity.com because Seth talks about why more people don’t go to museums.

a. the curators think the item on display is the whole thing. As a result, they slack off and do less than they should in creating an overall story

b. they assume that visitors are focused, interested and smart. They are rarely any of the three. As a result, the visit tends to be a glossed over one, not a deep one or a transcendent one

c. science museums in particular almost beg people NOT to think.

I can’t remember the last time a museum visit made my cry, made me sad or made me angry (except at the fact that they don’t try hard enough).

Besides, some people have negative associations with museums; my wife was raised in Poland where Museums were considered old, stuffy and boring!  I don’t find Museums boring, but I understand why many do - they don’t engage visitors enough (sounds like Musuems are often like bad websites that don’t work well enough).

“They asked how long it had been since he had been to a museum.  But the group that liked his books spoke up pretty quickly, and first acknowledged that he was trying to needle them, but then said – wait, he is part of our audience, and clearly he has thought this.  And if we are not listening to our audiences, then we may not be doing our jobs well at all.  This was bounced around for a while.  At the end I pulled it back towards Godin’s books and asked what, if anything, they got from the books, felt like they could take back to their museums and use, or share with their bosses.  Even a couple of the Godin-haters mentioned things they got from them.  After the book club, back at the cabin we were staying in, there was a lot of talking around the fireplace about branding and stories, so it was clear the books, and the discussion, made them think.”

Sounds like Seth Godin’s books were examined by museum directors and it got them to think.  If you stop to think, getting people to a museum and keeping them engaged is the same exact problem as getting people to a website and engageing them enough that they stay. 

The solution for a website is usually better content and better design.  In the case of museums, it’s not so much the content as the presentation and activities at the museum that encourage people to want to be there and have a positive experience.

Again, I’m not the person who has a problem with museums - I like them overall, but many don’t like museums and there’s probably a valid reason why.