NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES ONE-HIT WONDERS: WHY SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT WORKS OF MODERN ART ARE NOT BY IMPORTANT ARTISTS David W. Galenson Working Paper 10885 http://www.nber.org/papers/w10885 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 November 2004 The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research. © 2004 by David W. Galenson. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. One Hit Wonders: Why Some of the Most Important Works of Art are Not by Important Artists David W. Galenson NBER Working Paper No. 10885 November 2004 JEL No. J0, J4 ABSTRACT How can minor artists produce major works of art? This paper considers 13 modern visual artists, each of whom produced a single masterpiece that dominates the artist’s career. The artists include painters, sculptors, and architects, and their masterpieces include works as prominent as the painting American Gothic, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D. C. In each case, these isolated achievements were the products of innovative ideas that the artists formulated early in their careers, and fully embodied in individual works. The phenomenon of the artistic one-hit wonder highlights the nature of conceptual innovation, in which radical new approaches based on new ideas are introduced suddenly by young practitioners. David W. Galenson Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 and NBER
[email protected] 3 The history of popular music is haunted by the ghosts of scores of singers and groups who made a single hit song and were never heard from again.