Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02163.
Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 1G5, Canada.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Aug 29;120(35):e2302269120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2302269120. Epub 2023 Aug 21.
This study explores the longevity of artistic reputation. We empirically examine whether artists are more- or less-venerated after their death. We construct a massive historical corpus spanning 1795 to 2020 and build separate word-embedding models for each five-year period to examine how the reputations of over 3,300 famous artists-including painters, architects, composers, musicians, and writers-evolve after their death. We find that most artists gain their highest reputation right before their death, after which it declines, losing nearly one SD every century. This posthumous decline applies to artists in all domains, includes those who died young or unexpectedly, and contradicts the popular view that artists' reputations endure. Contrary to the Matthew effect, the reputational decline is the steepest for those who had the highest reputations while alive. Two mechanisms-artists' reduced visibility and the public's changing taste-are associated with much of the posthumous reputational decline. This study underscores the fragility of human reputation and shows how the collective memory of artists unfolds over time.
这项研究探讨了艺术声誉的持久性。我们通过实证研究考察了艺术家在去世后是否会受到更多或更少的崇敬。我们构建了一个庞大的历史语料库，涵盖了 1795 年至 2020 年的时间，并为每个五年期分别构建了单独的单词嵌入模型，以研究包括画家、建筑师、作曲家、音乐家和作家在内的 3300 多位著名艺术家的声誉在去世后如何演变。我们发现，大多数艺术家在去世前获得了最高的声誉，之后声誉开始下降，每过一个世纪就会损失近一个标准差。这种死后的衰落适用于所有领域的艺术家，包括那些英年早逝或意外去世的艺术家，这与艺术家的声誉经久不衰的流行观点相矛盾。与马太效应相反，生前声誉最高的艺术家的声誉下降幅度最大。艺术家知名度的降低和公众口味的变化这两个机制与大部分死后声誉下降有关。这项研究强调了人类声誉的脆弱性，并展示了艺术家的集体记忆是如何随着时间的推移而展开的。
