Fame as an Illusion of Creativity: Evidence from the Pioneers of Abstract Art

Banerjee Mitali () and Paul L. Ingram
Additional contact information
Banerjee Mitali: HEC Paris - Strategy & Business Policy
Paul L. Ingram: Columbia Business School - Management

No 1305, HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris

Abstract: We build a social structural model of fame, which departs from the atomistic view of prior literature where creativity is the sole driver of fame in creative markets. We test the model in a significant empirical context: 90 pioneers of the early 20th century (1910–25) abstract art movement. We find that an artist in a brokerage rather than a closure position was likely to become more famous. This effect was not, however, associated with the artist’s creativity, which we measured using both objective computational methods and subjective expert evaluations, and which was not itself related to fame. Rather than creativity, brokerage networks were associated with cosmopolitan identities—broker’s alters were likely to differ more from each other’s nationalities--and this was the key social-structural driver of fame.

Keywords: fame; creativity; identity; creative markets; social networks; social structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2018-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul and nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3258318 Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:heccah:1305

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris HEC Paris, 78351 Jouy-en-Josas cedex, France. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antoine Haldemann ().