Poetics | 2021
Artistic movement membership and the career profiles of Canadian painters
Abstract
Abstract Sociologists, psychologists and economists have studied many aspects of the effects on human creativity, especially that of artists, of the social setting in which creative activity takes place. In the last hundred and fifty years or so, the field of advanced creation in visual art has been heavily characterized by the existence of artistic movements, small groupings of artists having aesthetic or programmatic similarities and using the group to further their collective programme, and, one would suppose, their individual careers and creative trajectories. This is true of Canadian painting, with such movements as the Group of Seven or the Automatistes being of major importance. We econometrically investigate the effect on career dynamics of artists as represented by the life-cycle pattern of prices obtained by their works at auction, in estimating a hedonic regression for Canadian painters, in which variables representing the effect of a number of specific artistic groupings on the career price profiles of the members of the movements are included. Based on distinctions in the art historical and sociological literature among different categorizations of modern artistic grouping, we posit that the creativity effects of group membership can depend on the category of grouping to which an artist belongs, and distinguish between avant-garde movements and more general groupings of modern artists. We argue that this distinction reflects the general dichotomy in network creativity analysis between “strong ties” and “loose ties” groupings.