> In areas of human activity where performance is difficult to quantify in an objective fashion, reputation and networks of influence play a key role in determining access to resources and rewards. To understand the role of these factors, we reconstructed the exhibition history of half a million artists, mapping out the coexhibition network that captures the movement of art between institutions. Centrality within this network captured institutional prestige, allowing us to explore the career trajectory of individual artists in terms of access to coveted institutions. Early access to prestigious central institutions offered life-long access to high-prestige venues and reduced dropout rate. By contrast, starting at the network periphery resulted in a high dropout rate, limiting access to central institutions. A Markov model predicts the career trajectory of individual artists and documents the strong path and history dependence of valuation in art.
Banksy did not rely on meeting people, quite the opposite.
There's a documentary called the price of everything of a man who spent a decade with his wife in his secluded art studio producing a new art technique and came back in 2015-2016 to 'turn in his work' and made bank.
There's more to art than nepotism.
The social circle thing is so prevalent that most artist I've met that sell regularly spend about as much or more time networking as they do making art. Most folks are just stuck having luck enough to sell from time to time, especially if they are outliers and not doing things that match many living rooms.
> There's more to art than nepotism.
Fortunately yes.
I'm sorry, I didn't go to art school myself. I was alergic to art school culture, so I transferred to computer science. But I've been in and around lots of artist groups over the years. Even made a small business out of making installations for artists, for a short while. (That's a while other thing. Big Art artists often don't make their own things. They're more like producers or project managers than technicians).
The one thing that struck as the big difference between the artists who were making it and the ones who were struggling was really just their social group. The ones who were making it came from rich families, knew art dealers, and were getting invited to the "popular" artist parties.
At least, that was the case for "fine" art, artists selling a small number of high-value pieces. The other way to make it was to make a large number of populist pieces, for mass production, and then hustle hard on the craft fair circuit. If they could build a following that way and refine their process to cut costs to the bar minimum, then they could maybe explode selling online.
But just going to art school, being really creative and a master of craft, and hoping someone will discover you... Never seen it happen.
It's interesting, because I think it actually has a lot of parallels to open source software. You don't really get big in OSS by making a cool program. You have to market the shit out of it. And about the only way to do that in a way that OSS users aren't allergic to is networking on the public speaking circuit, knowing lots of other popular developers, getting them to use your software.