Predicting the next great artists
Albert-László Barabási is a frequently published network scientist with interests in a vast array of subjects. As an admirer of the arts long before concentrating on the sciences, one goal was the development of a model to predict the eventual career success of visual artists based on a simple set of variables.
Watch the following short video for Barabási’s explanation and then come back for a few thoughts I’ve cobbled together about his project and its relationship to some myths and realities of the visual art market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgZ1X4Dok3Y
Through my art world travels over the past thirty+ years, one question that inevitably arises when speaking with people who follow the visual arts but don’t necessarily work directly in the field usually goes like this:
Why is Artist X so successful while the seemingly better Artist Y is not?
Most persons who feel compelled to ask this question are not happy with my answer despite reams of evidence that support it, including Albert-László Barabási’s network model based on extensively researched art network data.
But first, let’s back up a little and set the scene with the other basic questions that almost everyone asks:
What is art?
Who decides if something is considered art or not?
How do they decide whether what someone is doing has artistic value?
To start we need to define a few important factors. I don’t want to go down the social media rabbit hole of defining what is art and what it is not art in this article. That’s a highly subjective matter, albeit with some guard rails and pointers that have been honed over time. For now I’ll describe visual art loosely as any object or experience that represents the expression of human creativity that extends beyond the utilitarian value of the finished object or presentation. Art expresses and applies imagination and skill. There are countless subcategories of visual art, some that intend to be aesthetically pleasing, others that are created to have an emotional impact or express vision, ideas, messages, or feelings. Art can be a personal reflection or not related to the artist in the slightest. Art can also be the answer to visual concepts and questions.
In short, art encapsulates human creativity, emotion, and ingenuity and presents them through visual and sensory experiences. Assuming this broad interpretation for this article, the next question is who determines the comparative values of artworks.
Protecting the Canon
For hobbyists and amateurs, the first person who decides whether something is art or not is the creator. After the work is introduced into the public sphere, other players will ultimately decide whether certain works and artists deserve further evaluation as worthy of a place in the historical canon of visual art. This is a gradual process with many persons and institutions involved. Curators, critics, art historians, and the broader world of design academia all take their shots over a long period, often decades. Final determinations of artistic value, influence, and importance are often not made until long after an artist passes, with Vincent Van Gogh being a prime example.
For anyone worried about grave injustices occurring to artists and their excellent work, rest assured that the canon of visual art is in good hands. Few decisions are made in haste or isolation; there’s plenty of brainstorming and group analyses taking place, and diverse evaluations are aggregated until consensus is achieved. Decisions are also dynamic, with many art careers being resuscitated years down the line after new revelations or careful reconsideration.
Marketability
Further evaluation applies when artists seek placement in the commercial art market intending to sell their work. Once that decision is made, another group of market movers takes part, including gallerists, museum specialists, auction houses, art consultants, dealers, art market trend analysts and collectors. The opinions of artists and academics start to become far less influential at this stage, although the rising importance of social media is certainly affecting how popularity and value are perceived and calculated, with the general public recently playing an oversized role in the determination of the fate of several artists (More on this important topic in an upcoming article.)
The next step is to define the factors being evaluated by the aforementioned influence peddlers, both the professionals and the amateurs. In short, art valuation as it pertains to success is not defined solely by artistic talent, rather it is a complex equation of factors related to talent, backstories, location, exposure, promotional support, personal networks, intrinsic factors, tastes, trends, social popularity, fame, and perhaps more than anything: opportunity. Yes, it might simply be nothing more than being in the right place at the right time.
Do the finest artists usually rise to the top? Generally, yes. Astute art professionals are very good at choosing winners, but some take longer than others. That said, do many great artists fall through the cracks? Also yes. Some might question the apparent contradiction, but it’s a simple equation. Simply, there are far more worthy artists than there are collectors, institutions and art professionals with the space and time to provide the platforms and logistics from which all gifted artists can flourish.
Back to Barabási
By first developing a complex network of relationships between all “players” in the art world, it became obvious relatively quickly to Barabási that there are paths to the pinnacle of the art world that are infinitely faster and better than others. His model only requires a list of the venues for an artist’s first five exhibitions to accurately determine the likelihood of a successful career with surprising accuracy. The beauty of his model was that it was unnecessary to even see the artworks in question, much less evaluate or compare them to the works of other artists.
Of course, most artists and casual viewers alike will find this extremely frustrating, but for anyone with even marginal experience in the art industry, it’s not surprising at all. It is generally accepted that where artists exhibit can be at least equally important long term as what they exhibit, especially early in a career when the most important connections are nurtured. Barabási’s network model proves this succinctly. While we can argue that it’s not healthy that a handful of galleries and museums can corner the cream-of-the-crop so early in artists’ careers, it’s also a testament to their ability to discover artists whose careers will truly stand the test of time.
Cynics will say that the art market has always been rigged and over-influenced by certain gatekeepers. While there’s plenty of that going on, it’s an oversimplification. The historical fact is that there are limited opportunities left for quality artists to break through once the galleries, dealers and consultants have made their initial selections. Artists selected early by the influencers at the top of the art world food chain have substantially better odds at having lucrative careers, all else being equal. The rest according to Barabási are far more likely to top out as middle-tier artists or lower unless they make a significant mid-career change somewhere along the line that catapults them onto a different trajectory with better network affiliations.
In many ways, this is a terrifying finding, and it certainly explains the desperation for many young artists to find their way to the nearest art megacenter to get their careers off on the right foot. I say terrifying because many artists were taught to start small, build a local following, and then gradually attempt to rise through the ranks while garnering incrementally better representation along the way. While this was certainly admirable — and it worked for many generations of artists — it doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. It’s quite possible that glass ceilings now exist on most of these tangential paths. Nevertheless, alternatives are constantly being sought.
I’ve seen nothing from the most recent Gen Z and millennial generations that suggests they’re willing to take the methodical, patient approach to anything in their lives, nor do most of them care how anything used to be done. This is not a knock on young artists, in fact I applaud their initiative to make things happen. It’s no surprise that they are unwilling to wait their turn when there’s rarely a written or even verbal guarantee that their turn will actually come. Instead, young artists are taking a do-it-themselves approach through social media and artist-driven entities similar to the marketing deployed by the Young British Artists a few decades ago.
Can't find a gallery to exhibit your work? Open your own. Can't afford the costs? Team with other artists in a consortium to share exhibition and marketing costs. Not getting the media coverage from the traditional media outlets you feel you deserve? Bombard social media until people take notice, then let the public forum decide. We’ll know in a few years whether these new approaches disrupt the art world data in Barabási’s model.
From personal experience assisting the careers of several artists over the years and building my own, one notable difference I often saw that challenges Barabási’s first-five-show theory is the case of international artists, many of whom emerged slowly in their local markets, eventually rising to the top in their region after dozens of successful events before being “promoted” to one of the larger platforms. Then they seem to explode overnight on the big stage even though they’d be developing their work for many years outside of the major markets. Not enough is published about Barabási’s model to know if perhaps he’s only counting shows from the moment an artist first appears in one of those larger markets. This would perhaps explain the sudden Western market success of hundreds of mid-career Latin American and African artists in the late 20th century and Asian artists in the early 21st.
Generational and geographic differences aside, I’d love nothing better than to get my hands on Barabási’s network data set complete with emails, addresses, and social media handles!
A former international hard-news journalist and photographer before turning his entire attention to the world of visual art, JP has been published on four continents since the late eighties. His photography and artwork can be viewed at his website, jppaul.com, and altsur.com.