TY  - JOUR
AU  - Galenson,David W.
TI  - One Hit Wonders: Why Some of the Most Important Works of Modern Art are Not by Important Artists
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10885
PY  - 2004
Y2  - November 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10885
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10885.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Galenson
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
Tel: 773/702-8258
Fax: 773/702-8490
E-Mail: galenson@uchicago.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -