Genius for Sale! Abstracts & Papers
March 15, 2014
by Diana Greenwald | Filed in: Conferences
For full biographies of each speaker, please visit this page.
Prof. Kathryn Graddy, Brandeis University, “Taste Endures! The Rankings of Roger de Piles (†1709) and Three Centuries of Art Prices”
Roger de Piles (1635–1709) was a French art critic who decomposed the style and ability of 58 different artists into areas of composition, drawing, color, and expression, rating each artist on a 20-point scale in each category. Based on evidence from two data sets that together span from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, this article shows that De Piles’ overall ratings have withstood the test of a very long period of time, with estimates indicating that the works of his higher-rated artists achieved both greater returns and higher critical acclaim than the works of his lower-rated artists.
The full paper, which was recently published in the Journal of Economic History, is available here.
Ms Diana Greenwald, University of Oxford, “Picturing the Country in the City: A Statistical Analysis of Rural Imagery at the Paris Salon”
During the 19th century, French artists created and displayed thousands of images of rural France and its inhabitants. The existing academic literature explains the phenomenon by attributing a fascination with the peasantry to audiences’ and artists’ response to increasing urbanization and industrialization. However, these arguments couched in anecdotal terms and based on the limited visual evidence that is still extant today.
Using quantitative methods and a previously untapped data set—an index to the roughly 114,000 paintings displayed at the Paris Salon between 1831 and 1881—this project empirically tests how images of rural life developed in response to social and economic change during the 19th century. In conducting this case study, this project discusses how humanities scholars can engage with two central analytical concepts in the social sciences: sensitivity to sample bias and discerning causal links from coincidence or correlation.
Further information about this project is available here.
Dr. Richard Taws, Everything Flows: Networking the Everyday in Napoleonic Paris
Between the Revolutions of 1789 and 1848, an optical, or semaphoric, telegraphic network extended for 5000 kilometres across France, transforming the speed at which information could be transmitted across space and time. This system, devised by Claude Chappe, was a significant and widespread means of communication, particularly for military purposes, although numerous proposals to turn it over to commercial use were also raised during this time. It was replaced by electromagnetic telegraphy in the mid 1850s, although for a while afterwards electrical telegraphy continued to replicate the protocols and codes of its mechanical predecessor. This paper considers how new possibilities for information transmission prompted by the development of the optical telegraph system intersected with artistic practice, and examines the consequences of this for some broader economic and structural transformations in Napoleonic Paris. Departing from close readings of some little-discussed genre paintings by military artist Swebach-Desfontaines, and drawing on a range of later works by artists including Honoré Daumier and Étienne Bouhot, the paper will examine how artists mediated the confluence of information networks and economic and political systems, as well as regenerated urban conduits such as rivers, fountains and roads. Focusing on the representative ‘economy’ of the visual arts, and the ways in which economic structures and institutions (the Bourse, the Paris mint) were visualized in a range of media, the paper speculates on some of the ways in which informational, artistic and economic systems overlapped.
Prof. Karol Borowiecki, University of Southern Denmark, “How Are You My Dearest Mozart? An Economic Analysis of the Well-being and Creativity of Three Famous Composers”
The well-being of a person is reflected in the language used. Building on 1,400 letters written by three famous music composers, I obtain well-being indices that span their lifetime. The validity of this methodology is shown by linking the indices with biographical information and through estimation of the determinants of well-being. I find, consistent with the literature, that work-related engagements and accomplishments are positively related with well-being, while poor health or death of a relative is detrimental. I then exploit the data and provide quantitative evidence on the existence of a causal impact of negative emotions on outstanding creativity, an association hypothesized across several disciplines since the Antiquity; however, not yet convincingly established for the case of extraordinary achievers.
The working paper is available here.
Prof. Narve Fulsas, University of Tromso, “Market Economy, Work Discipline and Prose in the Making of Ibsen’s Modern Drama”
Henrik Ibsen’s relation to Norway has generally been perceived as a relation of controversy, hostility, or irrelevance. Investigating the economic side of his authorship a completely different picture emerges, a picture of astonishing economic success and of attention and recognition without precedent. My paper will pay special attention to Ibsen’s reinvention of himself as author of contemporary prose plays from the end of the 1870s, initiated by Pillars of the Community (1877) and A Doll’s House (1879). In Scandinavia these plays brought book sale and theatre attendance to new heights. They are also central works of the so-called ‘modern breakthrough’ in Scandinavian literature and they were the plays that made Ibsen’s name in Europe a decade later.
Ibsen’s ‘social plays’ were products of the emergence of a ‘mass reading public’ in Scandinavia from the 1870s, as well as being hugely successful theatre plays, and their market potential was anticipated. Ibsen’s commercial success enhanced his literary autonomy, allowing him to concentrate solely on his dramatic authorship, and the expansion of the literary market allowed literature in general to expand into a relatively autonomous subsystem. But while the market provided literature with greater autonomy, the world of literature was at the same time constructed as an ‘inverse economy’, opposing ‘free’ art to demand and ‘bourgeois’ recognition. Ghosts (1881) seemed to be a perfect illustration of the irreconcilable opposition between literary value and economic value. A remarkable feature of Ibsen’s career is that he managed to negotiate the difficult terrain between symbolic and ‘real’ economy in a way that eventually allowed him to maximize economic, social, and literary capital at one and the same time. The case of Ibsen illustrates how artistic autonomy was enhanced by an expanding literary market economy, and at the same time how autonomy had to be renegotiated under such conditions and how the real importance of economic success had to be obscured, misrepresented, or outright denied.
Prof. Robert Gildea, University of Oxford, “Historians, Literature and Art. The case of nineteenth century France”
This is a reflective communication on the learning curve of a my relation of literature and art to historical study over the last thirty years. It was prompted by correspondence in 2013 with editor of Nouvelle Histoire de la France contemporaine about the use of literary texts in historical writing.
It traces the use of literature and art in three ways over time: (i) the provision of local colour to historical description (ii) the development of a rather awkward model of studying culture: the high road of literary/artistic/musical relations together with a sociological study of production and consumption of culture (iii) following the lesson of the linguistic turn that texts are not reflections of reality but rather construct it, some ideas on how nineteenth-century France may be studied through the eyes of novelists as well as travellers, political commentators and economists, building in the contextualisation of time and place. The piece finishes with lessons learned from a lecture on Daumier in his century given at the Royal Academy last November.
Mr Jonathan Paine, Que ‘vaut’ le récit? Narrative value and transaction in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Writing for readers is as much an economic activity as a creative one. Authors must publish to get paid: publishers monetise manuscripts. This paper re-examines the role of narrative as economic transaction and the role of economic transaction in narrative, and proposes a framework for understanding how narrative behaves as an economic commodity. It illustrates the relevance of this approach by an analysis of aspects of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov from this perspective and suggests that this leads to a significant reappraisal of Dostoevsky’s narrative technique.
Prof. William Mills Todd III, Dostoevsky and the Moral Hazards of Serial Publication
This paper draws upon a venerable notion in economics, moral hazard, to explore the literary field of mid nineteenth century Russia. A moral hazard arises when a party will take a risk because the costs would be felt by the other party in the transaction. Almost every canonical nineteenth century novel was published in serial form in a “thick journal.” In this paper I explore three sets of interactions involved in serial publication: writer – publisher, writer+publisher – censor, writer – reader. MR, I argue, to explore the ways in which risk involved much more for these agents than the interpretation of texts.