Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture

1

Introduction and Overview

Victor Ginsburgha,b and David Throsbyc,    aECARES, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels,    bCORE, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve,    cMacquarie University, Sydney, Australia

JEL Classification Code

Z1

1.1 Introduction

The introductory chapter to the first volume of the Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture gave an account of the historical evolution of the discipline known as cultural economics, now more appropriately referred to as the economics of art and culture. It was pointed out there that from its initial (and continuing) preoccupation with the economics of the arts, this area of economic theory and analysis has grown considerably in recent years, widening its focus to embrace a range of issues in the broadly defined cultural arena. These developments had already been noted by Mark Blaug in one of the surveys of the field cited in that introductory chapter. Whilst acknowledging that most of the literature in cultural economics remained concerned with ‘the narrower conception … [of] the economics of the performing, visual and literary arts’, Blaug commented on the expansion of the field, observing that it had been widened to ‘embrace the economics of culture, turning it from a sub-discipline of economics into a sub-discipline of anthropology’ (Blaug, 2001, p. 123).

Since the publication of the first volume of this Handbook in 2006, these trends have continued, persuading us that this second volume should extend its coverage to reflect developments in the field.¹ At the same time we have to remain aware that much innovative research in the economics of art and culture continues to be devoted to economic analysis of all aspects of production, distribution, and consumption in the creative arts, trade in cultural goods, cultural heritage, cultural policy issues, and so on. Thus, in compiling this second volume we have endeavored to strike a balance between the half-century of tradition in cultural economics and the research profession’s more recent interest in issues lying beyond the disciplinary boundaries set by conventional economic theory and analysis. Although most of our contributors are economists, several chapters are written by scholars from other disciplines: psychology, aesthetic theory, literary studies, law, and anthropology. We regard interdisciplinary enquiry as a bridge-building process; accordingly, we hope that the contents of this volume will be of interest not only to economists, but also to outsiders who may be surprised to discover that economics has something to say about issues in the arts and culture with which they are concerned.

In this introductory chapter we provide an overview of the volume, which we have assembled under five headings. The first group deals with issues of value and valuation—how to conceptualize the value of various cultural phenomena and how to measure it. We include three chapters in the second group that approach the economics of art from the demand side. The third category covers what can be loosely referred to as the creative or cultural industries, referring particularly to the operations of enterprises in the performing arts. Cultural diversity—a relatively recent area of interest in the field—provides the theme for the fourth group of chapters, several of which discuss relationships between diversity and international trade in cultural goods and services. Finally, under the heading ‘broader cultural issues’ we include contributions that draw significantly on anthropology and related areas. This chapter then concludes with some observations about further research.

1.2 Value and Evaluation in Art and Culture

Questions of value recur throughout the social sciences and humanities, not least in economics. The six chapters in this group approach the creation and/or reception of value for artistic and cultural goods and services from several different disciplinary standpoints. The first chapter in the group begins at the beginning; art, like science, necessarily starts with creation—a matter that should be of concern to cultural economists, who might find it useful to know something about the origins of what they study. The aspect of creative work that Dean Simonton deals with in Chapter 2 stands at the top end of artistic achievement, namely the emergence of genius. His psychological treatment is primarily theoretical although the findings described are based on impressive datasets. Like other contributors in this group he is concerned with measurement issues: what is the extent of consensus about genius and what is the degree of temporal stability? Factors contributing to the development of genius and the personal attributes of eminent artists differ between writers, composers, and visual artists—the three most prominent domains of artistic achievement. It is not only internal factors that foster the emergence of outstanding artists, it is also the sociocultural context in which they work, including the political and economic milieu.

Once an artwork is created, whether by a genius or by a lesser mortal, the question of value switches from its creation to its reception by the consumer. The next three chapters in this first group deal with the issue of the interpretation of the value of art, from the viewpoints of psychology, economics, and philosophy, respectively. Paul Locher, an experimental psychologist, looks in Chapter 3 at the factors affecting the aesthetic experience of visual art: how is ‘beauty’ perceived? He uses experimental aesthetics to study forms of behavior that center round observers’ interactions with works of art and other aesthetic phenomena using a variety of research techniques and controlled observation. Locher surveys the diversity of methodologies used to study aesthetic experience in several visual art forms, including painting, film, photography, sculpture, cuisine, design products, and dance. The methods he discusses bear some similarities to experimental approaches that have become common in empirical studies in behavioral economics.

The concept of cultural value as a means of encapsulating the various dimensions of the value of cultural goods and services has been discussed in several fields over the past 20 years.² Whether the term is applied to visual art, music, cultural heritage, movies, or literature, the term is acknowledged to be multifaceted—a characteristic that has stimulated efforts to deconstruct it into some more directly observable components. The next two chapters in this group address this issue. In Chapter 4, David Throsby and Anita Zednik discuss the challenge that this concept poses for economic theory and analysis. In conventional economics, a consumer whose demand for, say, a work of art is motivated by his or her perceptions of its aesthetic or symbolic qualities will express the strength of those perceptions in his or her willingness to pay for the work. In other words, standard economic theory assumes that a financial assessment will capture all sources of value attributable to the work, rendering the need for a separate concept of cultural value redundant. These authors use data from a survey of people’s attitudes to paintings to demonstrate that some dimensions to the paintings’ cultural value that people regard as important do not influence their economic valuation of the works, suggesting that a distinct category of cultural value does indeed exist alongside the economic value that is measured by the tools of economic analysis. They argue that if this result were found to be valid more widely, its implications could ramify into a range of policy areas, including support for the arts, international trade in cultural goods, heritage policy, and so on.

The disaggregation of cultural value into its various dimensions that is put forward by Throsby and Zednik from the viewpoint of economics is mirrored in spirit if not in detail in the multiple components in the value of music that are proposed from a philosophical perspective by Jerrold Levinson in Chapter 5. Levinson identifies firstly a ‘pure’ musical value, which he sees as a type of artistic value that is close to but not identical with aesthetic value. Beyond that he acknowledges a wider collection of values attributable to music, including economic, social, entertainment, and therapeutic values. He concludes that above all music is ‘a kind of companion to life itself, without which we would often feel more isolated’.

Judgments as to the value of artworks are implicated in the award of the sorts of prizes that have continued to proliferate across all fields of the arts. Chapter 6, by James English, is a follow-up to his 2005 book on ‘one of the great untold stories of cultural life’ concerned with the enormous flurry of prizes and awards in literature and the arts in general.³ These awards have often been shown to be distributed in a quite biased way,⁴ yet they have significant commercial consequences. Since there is a great deal of data, the award of prizes has been extensively analyzed for movies; prizes cause an increase in box office revenue, but box office income that has been realized before awards are distributed may also influence the choices of judges who are responsible for selecting winners.⁵ Although English is very critical of the awards industry as a whole, he nevertheless concludes with a certain amount of optimism: ‘The messy work of transvaluation and exchange that we accomplish through prizes is not to be understood as a threat to culture, but as the very means of its production—the vehicle of emergence for that special composite form of value that distinguishes the work of art’.

The final chapter in this group returns us to the hard-headed world of empirical methods in economic analysis. In Chapter 7, Ken Willis provides a comprehensive review of the application of stated preference methods to the valuation of the non-market values of cultural heritage—an area of cultural economics that has benefitted greatly from methodological advances made in environmental economics.⁶ He pays particular attention to the use of discrete choice models of various sorts, with reference to issues such as the underlying random utility theory, experimental design, accounting for interaction effects, controlling for choice complexity, and identifying differences between willingness to pay and willingness to accept loss. The technical sophistication of methods for measuring the non-market economic value of cultural goods and services stands in sharp contrast to the rudimentary methods that have been developed so far for the assessment of cultural value.

1.3 Demand, Consumption, and Investment

The three chapters in this section look at influences driving the demand for cultural goods in the marketplace. The chapter by David Walls on bestsellers and blockbusters in the movie, music, and book industries (Chapter 8) paints a very different picture of pathways to success in the arts from that told in Chapter 6 dealing with prizes. In the latter chapter, experts decide on who is to be rewarded, usually with little money but a lot of glory. In the world portrayed by Walls it is money that rules, associated with the superstar or winner-take-all phenomenon⁷ that makes some movies blockbusters or some books bestsellers. The principal focus of this chapter is on the statistical models used to quantify the distribution of success across competing titles; the chapter cites a wide range of applications that bring high-powered econometric methodologies to bear on the rich datasets that are available relating to the three cultural products covered.⁸ Walls’ suggestions for future research include a proposal for further investigation of the applicability of Anderson’s (2006) long-tail theory: are these markets characterized by long tails, heavy tails, steep tails, or tails of yet another sort?

Economists have long been interested in the demand for art; not surprisingly, most empirical studies in this area to date have been concerned with the traditional modes of artistic and cultural consumption such as attendances at performing arts events, visits to museums and galleries, purchases of books and music, and so on.⁹ Yet the landscape of cultural consumption has changed radically in the last decade or so as a result of the advent of new information and communication technologies, the rise of the Internet, and the spread of social media. An ever-increasing amount of creative material with cultural content is being produced and distributed using new technologies, and consumers are receiving their cultural products and experiences by very different means from those they utilized in the past. In Chapter 9, Jason Potts surveys the ways in which new technologies affect cultural consumption. He notes that technological change lowers the costs of cultural consumption, leading to a range of substitution effects and/or increases in demand. The variety of cultural products on offer in the marketplace is significantly expanded by technological change and new opportunities are opened up for consumers to become co-creators of cultural content.

A particular aspect of the demand for art that has received a lot of attention in the literature has been the demand for paintings, art objects, and other collectibles that may not only provide the buyer with enjoyable consumption experiences, but also act as a store of the owner’s wealth that may appreciate in value over time. This characteristic of art objects enables a distinction to be drawn between the consumption and investment demand for art. Benjamin Mandel investigates this distinction in Chapter 10 in a somewhat novel way, by using international trade data to determine whether the services provided by traded visual art more closely resemble consumption or investment service flows. By reference to the permanent income hypothesis, he is able to use cross-country trade data to show that changes in the permanent component of income are strongly correlated with international shipments of art, whereas art demand does not appear to respond to temporary income shocks. These observations support the proposition that international demand for visual art is primarily driven by consumption rather than investment motives.

1.4 Innovation and Technological Change

The four chapters in this group reflect in one way or another the recent rise in interest in aspects of industrial organization and firm behavior in the creative or cultural industries.¹⁰ Some part of this interest arises from the impact of new technologies on these industries, processes leading to changes in business models for cultural enterprises, and structural adjustment across the entire supply chain. The first of these chapters deals with the concept of innovation as it applies particularly to firms in the performing arts. In Chapter 11, Xavier Castañer refers to programming decisions by such firms, where innovation may mean the scheduling of new work, or work that is new to the organization, or work that is being performed in a new way, and so on. He surveys research in this area by sociologists, who have focused on internal drivers of innovation such as the characteristics of the firm’s managers, and by economists, who have taken a more market-oriented approach.

For cultural organizations to be able to program new works, or for consumers to be able to access new creative products in the marketplace, artists need to produce new works on a regular basis. Joel Waldfogel’s contribution on digitization, copyright, and the flow of new music products in Chapter 12 goes against the common belief shared by much of the literature on copyright protection and by the three major global music corporations—Sony, Universal, and Warner, which represent more than 71% of the music market; this is the belief that the new forms of musical sharing, as well as piracy, represent a threat to demand for paid-for music, but more importantly to the creativity of musicians, who are no longer protected by copyright. Waldfogel argues that other innovations have simultaneously reduced the costs of producing, promoting, and distributing music, so that a large number of independent record labels have flourished and young creators may even turn out to be better off than they were previously, since consumers are now able to discover and test a much wider range of music than before. Waldfogel concludes that although changing technology has weakened copyright protection, it is unclear on balance how the various impacts of such change will affect the flow of new music products.

The next chapter in this group turns to pricing behavior in the concert industry, where each live concert can be considered a unique cultural event. Pascal Courty and Mario Pagliero suggest in Chapter 13 that ‘Artists are celebrities who often rely on their public image to sell their art’. Some of them, Bruce Springsteen in particular, have never charged as much as they could for their tickets. Many suppliers are songwriters or composers and seem to act more as creators who see some sort of higher meaning in their music than as profit-maximizing entrepreneurs. The other side of the market (i.e. concert-goers) are fans who are loyal to their band. The price charged by each band is therefore not always a (local) monopoly price, but a price that reflects a ‘sincere understanding of, and commitment to, the art’. The chapter analyzes a database covering 20000 concerts given between 1992 and 2005 by 100 important artists. It investigates whether artists price-discriminate between tours, between cities in which they tour, and/or between seat categories in concert halls. The authors conclude nicely that not all artists are greedy; some do also behave in a pro-social manner.

A cultural industry of particular interest to economists is the media industry, where cultural messages are conveyed via television, radio, newspapers, or the Internet. In Chapter 14, Gillian Doyle discusses the dangers to the diversity of media voices that accompany increased concentration of ownership in the media industry generated at least in part by changing technologies. Media pluralism is seen as an important guarantee that ensures the continued existence of a diversity of political, social, and cultural viewpoints being represented in media output across a range of platforms. However, the quest for economic efficiencies in a production sector characterized by substantial opportunities for economies of scale and scope has driven an era of consolidation and cross-platform expansion by established and emerging media players. The tensions set up between conflicting sociocultural concerns, on the one hand, and economic and industrial policy priorities, on the other, have presented regulators with difficult and complex challenges. Doyle illustrates these concerns by reference to a specific example of a major media merger that was proposed in the United Kingdom in 2010.

1.5 Trade, Development, and Cultural Diversity

In October 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted a Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Four years later the Declaration was given a formal incarnation as an international standard-setting instrument in the form of the UN Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, or the ‘2005 Cultural Diversity Convention’ for short. More than 120 countries are now signatories to this treaty and are bound by its provisions relating amongst other things to a recognition that cultural goods and services should be valued in more than simply commercial terms, being conveyors of cultural content that has unique value in its own right. The United States, which is not a party to the Convention, has continued to maintain that this provision allows countries to take measures to protect their cultural industries, and hence acts as a restraint on international trade in cultural goods and services, particularly in the audiovisual sector. Thus, the seemingly innocuous matter of cultural diversity becomes implicated directly in a range of policy arenas dealing with trade, intellectual property, and economic development.

The first two chapters in this section are written from the perspective of international law. In Chapter 15, Lelio Iapadre provides an overview of theoretical contributions to an understanding of the links between trade and culture. It is widely believed that international economic integration can lead to cultural homogenization, such that under certain conditions and with specific qualifications, some forms of so-called efficient protection of the cultural sector may increase economic welfare. In other cases, free trade remains the optimal policy even if it entails some loss of cultural diversity. Iapadre discusses the options open to the international community to bring about some improvement in the governance of cultural trade. He argues that although bilateral and regional trade agreements continue to proliferate, a multilateral solution is needed to the trade versus culture controversy. He does not regard the 2005 UNESCO Convention as providing such a solution; rather, he suggests that a workable balance between the different positions can only be found by improving the regime administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The question as to whether or not the WTO system is in conflict with the mechanisms for protecting cultural diversity as embodied in the 2005 Cultural Diversity Convention is a matter taken up in Chapter 16 by Fiona Macmillan. She looks particularly at the effects on cultural diversity of the international copyright system, which is connected with international trade via the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). She finds that copyright law, together with behavior in the global market for cultural goods and services, has acted as a fetter on cultural diversity and cultural self-determination. Macmillan argues that these fettering effects may have been exacerbated by other WTO agreements.

A different approach to trade and cultural diversity is taken by Alberto Bisin and Thierry Verdier in their Chapter 17. They discuss the channels and dynamics of cultural transmission in a world characterized by the ever-increasing extent of globalization. Although globalization of culture can lead to efficiency gains as noted in earlier chapters, it also crowds out local goods, and may generate a loss of cultural identity and disenfranchise citizens. The authors present some recent formal economic models of cultural transmission and cultural evolution, showing how these models can be embedded into standard economic frameworks to analyze the linkages between globalization and cultural diversity.

The next two chapters turn our attention towards some further economic ramifications of diversity. Chapter 18 on cultural diversity, conflict, and economic development by Jose Garcia Montalvo and Marta Reynal-Querol and Chapter 19 on linguistic diversity by Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber are very much linked, since culture and language are very strongly intertwined. Both chapters tackle similar questions, namely whether cultural and/or linguistic diversity (or fractionalization) are ‘good’ or ‘bad’; the authors ask whether cultural or linguistic diversity is likely to generate conflict and hamper economic growth and political stability or whether it can on the contrary induce more creativity. Since Greenberg’s (1956) pioneering paper, indices used to measure diversity often take into account the population sizes of the various groups and, in the absence of other comprehensive aggregators, linguistic distances among these groups. They boil down to computing the probability that two members of the population chosen at random will belong to the same group or have at least one language in common. Montalvo and Reynal-Querol are at the origin of an index of polarization that puts more emphasis on the tails of the distribution of the population sizes of the groups. Indeed, this index is often more successful than diversity indices in explaining conflicts and their duration, as is shown by several case studies on growth, public goods, trust, and cooperation.

In the following chapter, Ginsburgh and Weber spend some time defining the other indices and the way they can be constructed, emphasizing the notion and computation of linguistic distances. They also present some case studies concerning the influence of linguistic distances on trade, migrations, and literary translations. Finally, the authors discuss the too-frequent reaction by politicians to linguistic diversity that consists in standardizing (e.g., teaching only in one language in the various regions of a country) that may lead to linguistic disenfranchisement. The chapter shows that the balance between diversity and disenfranchisement may be difficult to strike.

1.6 Broader Cultural Issues

The final group of chapters in this volume contains contributions dealing with issues that are obviously deeply entrenched in most cultures—and this is what gives them their anthropological flavor. These chapters show how these issues are interwoven with and can have an effect on economic, sociological, or legal outcomes.

In Chapter 20, Shalom Schwartz proposes a new way to study the distances between the cultures of national groups. Cultural distances are obviously more encompassing than the linguistic distances discussed in Chapter 19. Schwartz introduces new dimensions that he calls ‘cultural value orientations’, and produces distances for eight distinct world cultural regions that reflect the influence of geographic proximity, history, language, and other factors. He examines associations between culture, measured by the value orientations, and a variety of variables of economic significance, including socioeconomic factors, corruption, competitiveness, and democracy. The chapter analyzes how cultural distances affect the flow of investment around the world. Schwartz argues that his approach differs from well-known theories of cultural dimensions¹¹ insofar as it derives constructs from a priori theorizing and tests their fit to empirical data.

The economics of religion is an area that has grown considerably in recent years.¹² In Chapter 21, Gani Aldachef and Jean-Philippe Platteau argue in their introduction that there are:

… at least two fundamental reasons of why an economist might be interested in understanding the functioning of religious institutions and their relationship with economic development. The first comes from the role that religion plays in influencing [the highly persistent] cultural norms and beliefs in a society. … Secondly, religion is a principal source of social identification in a pre-industrial society. If identity matters for certain key aspects of economic behavior, such as cooperation and provision of public goods … we need to understand the effects of religious identification and of its intensity on the behavior of individuals.

They first take religion as given and analyze its effects on economic behavior, and next consider that, in some aspects at least, religion may become endogenous since it is often used by politicians to strengthen their power or weaken that of the opposition.

The final chapter examines strategic relationships between traditional norms in custom-driven poor societies and modern statutory law that aims to correct social inequalities embedded in the custom. In Chapter 22, Jean-Philippe Platteau and Zaki Wahhaj discuss these interactions mainly in developing countries in Africa and the Middle East and in India, where customs that victimize at least a fraction of the population, such as different inheritance provisions for men and women, female circumcision, or child marriage, are deeply rooted cultural facts. Platteau and Wahhaj suggest that modern laws are often rejected (‘dead letters’, to use their term) unless they are accompanied by social and political changes. They use some simple game-theoretical and political-economy arguments to show that there are other possibilities besides being just dead letters. If many members of the group appeal to modern law, customs can be displaced. Between dead letter and full displacement, there is a set of intermediate cases in which custom ends up going towards modern law.

1.7 Conclusion

All of the chapters in this volume indicate, either explicitly or implicitly, some fruitful areas for further research in the different aspects of the field that the chapters cover. To conclude, we would suggest simply that the future development of the subdiscipline of the economics of art and culture depends importantly on two significant considerations. (i) It depends on being able to continue to apply innovative theoretical and methodological developments from mainstream economics to the analysis of a range of challenging problems at micro, meso, and macro levels in the arts and culture. Much current research in the field is doing this; its vigor and imagination is evident, for example, in the pages of the field’s premier journal, the Journal of Cultural Economics. (ii) The subdiscipline needs to maintain its open-minded relationship with other areas of the humanities and social sciences—it is clear, for example, that research collaborations between cultural economists and scholars from other disciplines have the potential to enrich both sides of the divide.

We began this chapter with a reference to Mark Blaug. It may also be appropriate to end with one of his conclusions, where he regrets that cultural economics—a field that had been ‘created almost de novo by Baumol and Bowen’s (1966) book’—had not promoted ‘developments that would spill over with benefit to economics and econometrics outside of its own domain… [Cultural economics] is a little insular and unwilling to learn from the developments in other areas of economics, not to mention psychology, sociology and policy analysis’ (Blaug, 2001, p. 133). We agree with Blaug’s observation and suggest it is time to start thinking more ‘out of the box’. In this second volume of the Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture we hope that we have gone some way in this direction.

References

1. Adler M. Stardom and talent. In: Amsterdam: North-Holland; 2006;895–905. Ginsburgh V, Throsby D, eds. Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. vol. 1.

2. Anderson C. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion; 2006.

3. Baumol WJ, Bowen WG. Performing Arts: the Economic Dilemma. New York: Twentieth Century Fund; 1966.

4. Blaug M. Where are we now on cultural economics? Journal of Economic Surveys. 2001;15:123–143.

5. Caves RE. Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2000.

6. Connor S. Theory and Cultural Value. Oxford: Blackwell; 1992.

7. De Vany A. The movies. In: Amsterdam: North-Holland; 2006;615–668. Ginsburgh V, Throsby D, eds. Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. vol. 1.

8. Elliott C, Simmons R. Determinants of UK box office success: the impact of quality signals. Review of Industrial Organization. 2008;33:93–111.

9. English J. The Economics of Prestige Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2005.

10. Ginsburgh V. Awards, success and aesthetic quality in the arts. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 2003;17:99–111.

11. Ginsburgh V, Weber S. How Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic Diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2011.

12. Greenberg J. The measurement of linguistic diversity. Language. 1956;32:109–115.

13. Hofstede G. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations across Nations. second ed. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage; 2001.

14. Hutter M, Throsby D, eds. Beyond Price Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press; 2008.

15. Inglehart R, Baker WE. Modernization, cultural change and the persistence of traditional values. American Sociological Review. 2000;65:19–51.

16. Navrud S, Ready RC, eds. Valuing Cultural Heritage Applying Environmental Techniques to Historic Buildings, Monuments and Artifacts. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar; 2002.

17. Nelson R, Donihue M, Waldman D, Wheaton C. What’s an Oscar worth? Economic Inquiry. 2001;39:1–16.

18. Seaman B. Empirical studies of demand for the performing arts. In: Amsterdam: North-Holland; 2006;415–472. Ginsburgh V, Throsby D, eds. Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. vol. 1.

19. Throsby D. Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2001.

20. Throsby D. Introduction and overview. In: Amsterdam: North-Holland; 2006;3–22. Ginsburgh V, Throsby D, eds. Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. vol. 1.

¹Recent books published by both of the editors venture into these wider domains; see Hutter and Throsby (2008) and Ginsburgh and Weber (2011).

²For example, in literary studies (Connor, 1992); see also Throsby (2001), Hutter and Throsby (2008).

³Since one of us is an Australian from Sydney, it is fit to cite the Australian poet Peter Porter who, according to English (2005), is reputed to have said that ‘there is hardly any writer in Sydney who has not won [a prize]’. Porter died in 2010, without having known that after his death, Australia’s leading literary review, the Australian Book Review, would rename its poetry prize the Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

⁴See, for example, Ginsburgh (2003).

⁵See, for example, Nelson et al. (2001) and De Vany (2006) for the United States, and Elliott and Simmons (2008) for the United Kingdom.

⁶See, for example, Navrud and Ready (2002).

⁷See Adler (2006).

⁸See also De Vany (2006).

⁹As surveyed in the performing arts, for example, by Seaman (2006).

¹⁰See, for example, Caves (2000).

¹¹Such as those of Hofstede (2001) and Inglehart and Baker (2000).

¹²Religion was one of the significant fields mentioned in the conclusion to the introductory chapter in the first volume of this Handbook that would warrant appropriate coverage in a wider-ranging collection; see Throsby (2006, p. 21).

PART I: Value and evaluation in art and culture

Outline

Chapter 2 Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts

Chapter 3 Contemporary Experimental Aesthetics: Procedures and Findings

Chapter 4 The Economic and Cultural Value of Paintings: Some Empirical Evidence

Chapter 5 Values of Music

Chapter 6 The Economics of Cultural Awards

Chapter 7 The Use of Stated Preference Methods to Value Cultural Heritage

Chapter 2

Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts

Dean Keith Simonton,    University of California, Davis, USA

Abstract

This chapter examines creative genius in the three most prominent domains of artistic achievement: literature, music, and the visual arts. Treatment begins with the definition of artistic genius in terms of achieved eminence, with special attention to the measurement issues (i.e. magnitude of consensus and degree of temporal stability). From there discussion turns to the personal attributes of eminent artistic creators in the three domains, with an emphasis on how writers, composers, and artists differ from each other as well as from eminent scientific creators. The next issue concerns the developmental factors involved in the emergence and manifestation of artistic genius. These factors include both early developmental antecedents and adulthood career trajectories (especially the location of career peaks). The final topic pertains to the sociocultural contexts underlying outstanding artistic achievement. These contexts include both internal factors, such as artistic styles, as well as external factors, such as the political and economic milieu.

Keywords

Genius; Eminence; Achievement; Creativity; Literature; Music; Visual arts; Cognitive abilities; Personality traits; Developmental antecedents; Career Trajectories; Social contexts

JEL Classification Codes

D03; Z00; Z10; Z13

2.1 Introduction

What do Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo have in common? Clearly, they all can be considered geniuses. Yet what do they share that they do not share with other geniuses, such as Napoleon or Lenin? Certainly, the first three are creative geniuses rather than military or political geniuses. Moreover, we must get even more specific if we wish to distinguish Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo from, say, Newton or Darwin, for the triad represents creative genius in the arts rather than in the sciences. Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo are exemplars of artistic genius. Each demonstrated genius-level creativity in either literature, music, or the visual arts. However, what does genius signify?

The philosopher Immanuel Kant offered a provocative definition in his 1790 Critique of Judgement. According to him, ‘Genius is the talent … for producing that for which no definite rule can be given’.¹ As the products of genius follow no definite rules, ‘originality must be its primary quality’. Yet Kant was quick to notice that because ‘there may also be original nonsense, its products must at the same time be models, i.e. be exemplary’. Such exemplary products can be referred to as artistic masterworks. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and Michelangelo’s Pietà prove exemplars of excellence in their respective artistic domains. Interestingly, Kant argued that genius could only appear in the arts, not in the sciences. ‘Fine art is the art of genius’. The reason is that science does have rules to guide creativity – what we might now call the ‘scientific method’. The philosopher even denied Newton genius status. Although Kant’s stance may be debatable, there is no doubt that artistic and scientific creativity do not operate in the exact same manner.² In some crucial respects, Newton’s Principia Mathematica has a different standing than the masterpieces of the artistic trio. Most obviously, a scientific work is held to strict standards of logic and fact that have no counterparts in an artistic work.

It is my goal in this chapter to review the empirical research on creative genius in the arts. This review will be as broad as the research permits, covering all of the major arts, including literature, music, and the visual arts, in the latter case even encompassing cinema – the ‘seventh art’.³ At the same time, I will spend rather less attention on the theoretical speculations bearing upon this subject. That deliberate neglect reflects the fact that many empirical phenomena have multiple theoretical interpretations, whether economic, sociological, psychological – or even biological. What can be said with certainty is that any comprehensive account of artistic genius in its many forms will have to confront the empirical findings reported in this chapter. Cultural economists may be able to explicate all of the key results in economic terms or they may have to rely at least in part on the theoretical concepts incorporated from kindred sciences. The exact outcome is for future theoretical research to decide.

I begin by discussing achieved eminence – the most commonly used definition of genius, creative or otherwise.⁴ That accomplished, we can turn to the three sets of factors linked with achieved eminence (Section 2.2) in an artistic domain. These are individual attributes (Section 2.3), lifespan development (Section 2.4), and social processes (Section 2.5).

2.2 Achieved Eminence

Francis Galton (1869) was the first investigator to associate genius with achieved eminence. Genius was taken as ‘those qualities of intellect and disposition, which urge and qualify a man to perform acts that lead to reputation’ where the reputation is that ‘of a leader of opinion, of an originator, of a man to whom the world deliberately acknowledges itself largely indebted’.⁵ In short, the genius has made contributions that survive Hume’s classic ‘test of time’. In line with this conception, Galton introduced the practice of assessing genius in terms of posthumous reputation, especially as gauged by representation in standard reference works, such as biographical dictionaries, histories, and encyclopedias. Naturally, the methods for implementing these procedures have become far more sophisticated over the past century or so.⁶ Typically, assessments are based on multiple sources and then combined to form a composite measure that transcends the idiosyncrasies of any particular indicator. For example, the differential eminence of 121 classical composers was gauged using six different indicators⁷ and that of 772 Western artists was assessed via 27 different indicators.⁸ On occasion, such multiple source composite measures can be based on virtually every available reference work.⁹

To illustrate, Murray (2003) has determined the differential achieved eminence of the creative geniuses who highlight the principal forms of art in the most significant world civilizations. Here are the top five geniuses in rank order (the total number of ‘significant figures’¹⁰ in each category given in parentheses):

• Western music – Beethoven, Mozart, J. S. Bach, Wagner, and Handel (N = 523).

• Chinese painting – Zhao Mengfu, Gu Kaizhi, Wu Daozi, Dong Qichang, and Ma Yuan (N = 111).

• Japanese art – Sesshu, Sotatsu, Korin, Eitoku, and Tohaku (N = 81).

• Western art – Michelangelo, Picasso, Raphael, Leonardo, and Titian (N = 479).

• Arabic literature – al-Mutanabbi, Abu Nuwas, al-Ma’arri, Imru’al-Qays, and Abu Tammam (N = 82).

• Chinese literature – Du Fu, Li Bo, Bo Juyi, Su Dungpo, and Han Yu (N = 83).

• Indian literature – Kalidasa, Vyasa, Valmiki, Asvaghosa, and Bhartrhari (N = 43).

• Japanese literature – Basho, Chikamatsu, Murasaki, Saikaku, and Ogai (N = 85).

• Western literature – Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, Virgil, and Homer (N = 835).

Presumably, those figures that made the sample but received lower eminence ratings have lesser claim to the designation of creative genius in their respective art. For example, among the less distinguished contributors of Western literature are Jens Baggesen, William Bryant, Johann Heinse, Jorge de Lima, Laszlo Nemeth, and Geoffroy de Villehardouin. Yet even these more obscure figures belong to an elite selection of 835 significant figures out of a parent population of 1918 writers (Murray, 2003). Hence, more than half of the initial pool consists of literary creators less eminent than Baggesen and his colleagues.

The foregoing assessments were based exclusively on the amount of space devoted to each figure in the archival sources. Yet, for some artistic domains, a different kind of measure of differential eminence can be included. For instance, classical composers can be distinguished according to how frequently their works are performed or recorded.¹¹ Sometimes, too, experts in a given field are surveyed, asking them to provide assessments of relative merit, distinguishing the great from the also-rans.¹²

Whatever the specific measurement approach, researchers have identified three core findings about the resulting measures: evaluative consensus, temporal stability, and skewed distributions.

2.2.1 Evaluative Consensus

Although it is often said that ‘there’s no accounting for taste’ and that ‘one person’s meat is another person’s poison’, it is clear that alternative assessments of artistic eminence exhibit an impressive agreement. To return to Murray’s (2003) measures, for example, when he used reliability coefficients¹³ to assess the consensus, he obtained the following values: Western music 0.97, Chinese painting 0.91, Japanese art 0.93, Western art 0.95, Arabic literature 0.88, Chinese literature 0.89, Indian literature 0.91, Japanese literature 0.86, and Western literature 0.95. These statistics compare not only quite favorably with the best measures in the behavioral sciences (e.g. intelligence tests), but these coefficients are calculated for elite samples in which the variance in eminence would be heavily truncated and thus the reliabilities radically attenuated.¹⁴ Admittedly, somewhat lower reliability coefficients will obtain when the separate eminence measures are much more heterogeneous (e.g. space measures vis-à-vis expert evaluations). Yet, even then, the consensus will be strong. Most notably, latent-variable models indicate the presence of a single cohesive factor underlying all alternative indicators, a factor that has been referred to as ‘Galton’s G’¹⁵ (after an analogy to ‘Spearman’s g’, which represents the general intelligence factor).¹⁶ Residual factors (or rather correlations among the error terms for the indicator variables) represent nothing more than ‘difficulty factors’ (e.g. measures with highly skewed distributions will correlate more highly with each other than they will with measures with more normal distributions). These correlated residuals be what they may, Galton’s G explains most of the variance in any set of heterogeneous eminence assessments.

Two other features of this evaluative consensus also deserve mention. (i) The agreement is truly cross-national and even cross-cultural.¹⁷ The evaluation does not have to be based on German or Austrian sources for Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to be placed among the top 10 composers (if not in the top three). (ii) The agreement applies equally well to the assessment of single artworks (Hamlet, the Pietà) and not just to the artistic geniuses who created them. For example, the reliability coefficient for 19 highly heterogeneous evaluations of 37 Shakespeare plays was 0.88¹⁸ and the coefficient for 27 assessments of 154 Shakespeare sonnets was 0.89.¹⁹ To show that this product-level consensus extends beyond the work of a single creator, the differential merit of 911 operas assessed by 35 diverse measures was 0.86.²⁰ Comparable consensus applies to thousands of feature films evaluated by both critical evaluations and best-picture awards.²¹ Five critical evaluations have a reliability as high as 0.91,²² while seven best-picture awards have a reliability as high as 0.87.²³ In addition, just as a single latent variable underlies varied assessments of creator eminence, so a single-factor solution similarly applies to varied assessments of product merit.²⁴

The above two features are of course connected. Insofar as an artist’s reputation is predicated on the merit of his or her creative work, then the consensus regarding the creator must be partially contingent on the consensus on the products.²⁵

2.2.2 Temporal Stability

To be sure, one could argue ‘fame is fickle’ and therefore suspect that any evaluative consensus is only transient – a mere repercussion of fashions and fads. Eventually, the consensus will fade as the new replaces the old and centuries-old creators will be subjected to re-evaluations, the great becoming small and the small great. Yet the empirical data simply do not endorse this cynical view. To a very large degree, we can say that creative geniuses of the highest order ‘survive the test of time’.

In the first place, several empirical studies have demonstrated that temporal stability of reputation assessments can endure for decades, even centuries.²⁶ Perhaps the most striking example is a recent demonstration that the relative merits of Italian and Flemish Renaissance artists endured across the centuries with relatively minor fluctuations.²⁷ Undoubtedly, just as Michelangelo remains always at or near the top of the pecking order, so will Pablo Picasso’s status in twentieth-century art similarly survive in the eyes of posterity.²⁸

Second, even when latent-variable models are fit to eminence measures spread over time a single-factor solution still obtains.²⁹ This statistical outcome stands in contrast to the alternative hypothesis that consecutive evaluations – such as the judgments of successive generations – might be explained in terms of a first- or second-order autoregressive scheme.³⁰ Rather than each generation of critics or historians simply ‘borrowing’ their opinions from the previous generation of critics or historians (with some ‘random shock’ added), it instead appears that each generation is largely engaged in making an independent assessment of the lifework of those artistic geniuses.³¹ Any inter-generational influence is reduced to occasional and minor correlations among the residuals for successive indicators that are contiguous in time. Once more, the timeless Galton’s G dominates the data.

Third, and in line with the previous assertion, creative products display a similar degree of transhistorical stability.³² What is deemed a masterwork in the past will most likely be considered a masterpiece in the future (assuming the work survives intact without either deterioration or modification). As an example, one investigation scrutinized the short- and long-term fate of 496 operas created by 55 composers, where the operas were produced over a period spanning from 1607 to 1938.³³ The opera’s initial reception by contemporaries was shown to correlate very highly with how well received the same operas are in the later part of the twentieth century. If the aesthetic judgment of single products is highly stable, then so must be the evaluation of the individuals who created those products.

Nevertheless, the expected temporal stability may sometimes display lapses in specific cases. In the previously mentioned study, there were occasional periods in the history of opera where the tastes of audiences who saw the work’s debut did not predict how well the opera would be perceived by posterity (Simonton, 1998b). In particular, operas composed in the 1860s and 1870s, when the operatic form was undergoing substantial changes, appear to enjoy no then-versus-now agreement. Indeed, the opera with the biggest error of prediction was Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, perhaps the most revolutionary operatic product in opera’s history, which was premiered in 1865. Occasionally, products and their creators are ahead of their time – but only occasionally.

2.2.3 Skewed Distributions

Psychologists are accustomed to view most individual differences as being normally distributed in the population – the famed ‘bell-shaped’ or Gaussian curve. For instance, Galton (1869) maintained that genius was just found on the upper tail of the normal curve. Yet this conclusion cannot hold if we choose to define genius in terms of eminence or posthumous reputation. That conclusion is invalid because the distribution of the latter attribute is described by a distribution with a positive skew so pronounced that we cannot even speak of the lower tail of the distribution. The distribution only has an upper tail and one that is stretched out to an unusual degree. Martindale (1995) illustrates this reality in the case of 602 British poets about whom scholars have written 34 516 books. Of these, 9118 books concern Shakespeare, 1280 Milton, and 1096 Chaucer. The top 25 poets then attract the attention of almost two-thirds of the books and the top 12 earn the efforts of almost exactly half. That does not leave that many books for the poets at the bottom of the distribution.

Of course, economists are no strangers to skewed cross-sectional distributions, at least not since the advent of the Pareto Law for the income distribution. Even so, as Martindale (1995) pointed out, the distribution is far more skewed for eminence; he put it this way in his article’s title: ‘fame more fickle than fortune’. The distribution is also far more positively skewed than the similarly skewed distribution for the lifetime output of creative products. In essence, posterity begins with the latter distribution and then exaggerates the upper tail while collapsing together the creators at the lower end of the distribution. The 9118 books about Shakespeare are well out of proportion to the 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and a few large poems credited to the same literary genius. In all probability, that differential can be attributed to his artistry being not only original, but also astoundingly exemplary.

Significantly, the same right skew is found in the distribution of artistic merit of individual creative products.³⁴ The performance frequencies of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, show a positively skewed distribution, with Hamlet way out on the upper tail and the three plays of the Henry VI trilogy clumped together at the bottom.³⁵ The skew is even more pronounced when the measure of product merit is defined by awards and prizes – a fact that is perhaps most prominent in the case of feature films, only a small proportion of which will rake in the major best-picture awards.³⁶

The extremely skewed distribution often introduces methodological problems. To begin with, if we wish to understand how artistic genius corresponds to individual attributes and developmental factors, we must recognize that much of the variance at the top of the distribution may not correspond to anything at the individual level. That Shakespeare had 86% more books written about him than Milton does not mean that his intelligence quotient (IQ) was 86% higher or that he initially accumulated 86% more human capital. Indeed, all of those book credits were acquired after Shakespeare was long dead and thus could not do anything to increase his fame. In this sense, we are dealing with a phenomenon more akin to the very slack relation between stardom and talent discussed by economists.³⁷ The phenomenon also is linked with the sociological phenomenon of accumulative advantage, which can accrue independent of personal deserving.³⁸ Another difficulty is that when standard statistical techniques are applied to such skewed distributions, sizeable outliers usually appear that exert an inordinate impact on the parameter estimates (e.g. correlation or regression coefficients). It is for this reason that eminence measures are often subjected to a logarithmic transformation to bring the cases at the upper end of the distribution more in line with the rest.

Alternatively, researchers may use a different criterion measure, such as lifetime productivity, that can be assumed to agree more closely with the individual creator’s actual talent.³⁹ Although there is no limit to the number of books that can be written about Shakespeare, his own writing has totally ceased! Even so, because total output also exhibits a highly skewed distribution, this alternative measure should still undergo a logarithmic transformation. The only difference is that because the skew is far less prominent than holds for eminence measures, a log-transformed index of lifetime productivity comes closer to displaying a normal distribution with a less drastic upper tail.

2.3 Individual Attributes

A large number of investigations have examined the individual characteristics of artistic geniuses, most often in conjunction with geniuses in other domains, such as science and sometimes even various domains of leadership.⁴⁰ These attributes may be grouped into two categories: cognitive abilities and personality traits.

2.3.1 Cognitive Abilities

An obvious cognitive ability is general intelligence, or what is commonly referred to as the IQ. Almost from the outset of historiometric research on genius, researchers have devised means to gauge general intelligence from archival data.⁴¹ One investigation, in particular, used historiometric methods to estimate IQ scores for 301 geniuses in modern Western civilization.⁴² As expected, not only are historic geniuses more intelligent than average, with a mean around 150, but intelligence is positively correlated with eminence.⁴³ Nonetheless, the expected IQ was contingent on the specific domain in which eminence is attained.⁴⁴ Most strikingly, although great imaginative writers (novelists, dramatists, and poets) had IQs somewhat above average, the classical composers and the visual artists (painters, sculptors, and architects) were somewhat below average, as geniuses go, that is.⁴⁵ Apparently, the analytical skills captured by this intelligence measure are not as useful for non-literary artistic geniuses.

Closely related to the foregoing issue is creative versatility: the capacity of the genius to make notable contributions to more than one domain.⁴⁶ Among artistic geniuses, da Vinci and Goethe offer conspicuous illustrations. Not only is versatility positively correlated with both general intelligence and eminence,⁴⁷ but also the expected magnitude of versatility tends to vary according to the domain of eminent achievement.⁴⁸ For the artistic geniuses in Cox’s (1926) study, the greatest versatility was exhibited by the literary creators, both fiction and non-fiction, whereas the lowest versatility was displayed by the visual artists and, especially, the classical composers.⁴⁹ Mozart and Beethoven may count among the all-time greats of classical music, but neither of them was as versatile as Goethe, who was born before Mozart and died after Beethoven.

2.3.2 Dispositional Traits

Researchers have also examined various personality traits.⁵⁰ Some of these traits are generic rather than domain-specific. That is, all geniuses, artistic or not, display the characteristic. The most critical is motivational. Achieved eminence requires ‘persistence’, ‘tenacity of purpose’, ‘perseverance in the face of obstacles’, ‘ambition’, and the ‘desire to excel’.⁵¹ Indeed, ‘high but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence’.⁵² Directed energy can prove as powerful as intellectual ability.⁵³

Other personality characteristics tend to vary across domains of creative achievement.⁵⁴ Of special interest are those traits or symptoms associated with psychopathology. The commonplace notion of the ‘mad genius’ appears far more appropriate for the artist than for the scientist,⁵⁵ with literary creators – and especially poets – displaying the most vulnerability.⁵⁶ Consider the statistics in the following two investigations:

• When Post (1994) scrutinized 291 eminent creators and leaders, he differentiated whether psychopathology was absent, mild, marked, or severe. He obtained the following figures for artistic creators (respectively): composers 17.3%, 32.7%, 19.2%, and 30.8%; artists 14.6%, 29.1%, 18.8%, and 37.5%; and writers 2.0%, 10.0%, 42.0%, and 46.0%. These figures are almost completely inverted for the scientific geniuses in his sample: 31.1%, 24.4%, 26.7%, and 17.8%, for absent, mild, marked, and severe, respectively.

• Ludwig (1995) examined a more recent sample of eminent personalities⁵⁷ and used a slightly different criterion, namely the lifetime rate of any mental illness whatsoever, regardless of the severity.⁵⁸ The highest rates were exhibited by the poets (87%), followed by the fiction writers (77%), dramatists (74%), visual artists (73%), non-fiction writers (72%), and musical composers (60%). In contrast, eminent natural scientists have a rate less than half as high as the composers did (28%).

I hasten to point out that some researchers have challenged these statistics.⁵⁹ After all, such studies almost invariably depend on retrospective diagnoses using largely biographical material. Even so, the basic empirical findings have been corroborated using psychometric, psychiatric, experimental, survey, and epidemiological methods.⁶⁰ Investigators are even teasing out some of the underlying cognitive, affective, and genetic factors responsible for the association.⁶¹ Suffice it to say, creativity and psychopathology share common cognitive and affective attributes even if creative genius enjoys some additional attributes that ameliorate any psychopathological leanings. Furthermore, the stresses associated with the attainment of eminence can themselves contribute to psychopathology, including alcoholism.⁶² It must be emphasized, nonetheless, that when an artistic genius succumbs completely to madness, then creativity ceases.⁶³ This adverse repercussion is most obvious when the illness induces the genius to commit suicide – a tragic career termination for which female poets exhibit an unusually high risk.⁶⁴

2.4 Lifespan Development

The next issue concerns the developmental factors involved in the emergence and manifestation of artistic genius. These factors include both early developmental antecedents and adulthood career trajectories. At the close, I will examine the termination of a life and career.

2.4.1 Early Antecedents

Before the artistic genius can even begin to make the contributions necessary for attaining eminence, it is first necessary to develop creative potential. Here I concentrate on two sets of factors: family background and expertise acquisition.

2.4.1.1 Family Background

A classic debate in this area is whether genius is born or made – an issue first explicitly introduced by Galton in 1874 as the nature/nurture question. In 1869, Galton had already argued for a strong genetic basis for genius. His argument was founded on the extensive family pedigrees that can be documented for high achievement in almost every major domain.⁶⁵ These lineages were conspicuous in composers, painters, and literary figures (e.g. the Bach, Bellini, and Brontë families, respectively). However easy it is to compile such family pedigrees, their relevance to the nature/nurture issue is more ambiguous because parents provide not just genetic make-up for their offspring, but also environmental influences, including role models and mentors.⁶⁶ Moreover, it is possible to identify other family background factors that are more clearly environmental rather than genetic,⁶⁷ such as the impact of traumatic experiences in childhood and adolescence (e.g. early parental loss or orphanhood).⁶⁸ Interestingly, artistic geniuses hail from far more unstable, dysfunctional, unconventional, and even multicultural family backgrounds than do scientific geniuses.⁶⁹ This salient contrast is apparent in, for example, Nobel laureates in literature relative to the laureates in physics, the latter coming from highly stable and conventional families.⁷⁰

Art-versus-science developmental differences are also found with respect to birth order. With the exception of revolutionary scientists,⁷¹ scientific geniuses tend to be firstborns,⁷² whereas artistic geniuses may tend to be laterborns.⁷³ A major exception to the latter assertion is that the ordinal position of classical composers is more similar to scientific geniuses than to artistic geniuses.⁷⁴ This exception makes sense insofar as music is considered the ‘arithmetic of sound’, to use Claude Debussy’s expression.

Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention the powerful impact of gender on artistic genius. Let me begin by observing that women are drastically under-represented among historic geniuses, who tend to be ‘dead (white) males’.⁷⁵ Nevertheless, the historical data also show that female genius, when it does appear, has the likelihood of appearing in the arts, especially in literature.⁷⁶ For example, the female percentages in the main world literatures are as follows: Western 4.4%, Arabic 1.2%, Indian 4.7%, Chinese 3.6%, and Japanese 8.2%.⁷⁷ Although we are still a long way from understanding these gender effects, researchers have identified some of the potential influences,⁷⁸ many of which take place in the home.⁷⁹ It is also clear that the emergence of female genius is contingent on larger societal gender biases and stereotypes that operate outside the family setting.⁸⁰ One reason why women can excel as creative writers is that one does not have to acquire a professional position – academic or institutional – but rather can write at home. Still, many talented women avoided societal prejudices by writing under a male nom de plume, as did Mary Ann Evans (George Elliot) and Amantine Lucile Dupin (George Sand).

2.4.1.2 Expertise Acquisition

Economists have recognized the concept of ‘human capital’ in which talent can be considered an investment in terms of ‘education, study, or apprenticeship’.⁸¹ Research on talent development has amply documented the importance of this personal investment. In this sense, genius is made rather than born. One manifestation of this necessity is found in the research on expertise acquisition. Here investigators have discovered what has become known as the ‘10-year rule’, namely that it takes a decade of intense training, study, and practice before a talent attains the capacities of genius.⁸² Even a composer as precocious as Mozart did not become a mature artist until he had passed through over 10 years of apprenticeship.⁸³

That said, the role of expertise acquisition in creative development is far more complex than this simple rule might imply.⁸⁴ In the first place, young talents vary immensely in the time they need to master the domain and this cross-sectional variation has consequences for later impact. In particular, those who have shorter periods of apprenticeship are prone to attain higher levels of creative genius.⁸⁵ For this reason, eminence and total lifetime output are often associated with precocious productivity.⁸⁶ This inverse relation may bear some connection with innate talent: those born with greater ‘gifts’ within an artistic domain will require less time to attain domain mastery and then go on to display higher creativity in their adulthood career.⁸⁷

Another complication concerns the phenomenon of versatility discussed earlier.⁸⁸ If the 10-year rule applies to each domain in which a genius achieves eminence, then it would seem impossible for anyone to exhibit the versatility of a Goethe or Leonardo, or if some genius did display such versatility then