The influence of color on prices of abstract paintings

Maksim Borisov, Valeria Kolycheva, Alexander Semenov and Dmitry Grigoriev

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Determination of price of an artwork is a fundamental problem in cultural economics. In this work we investigate what impact visual characteristics of a painting have on its price. We construct a number of visual features measuring complexity of the painting, its points of interest, segmentation-based features, local color features, and features based on Itten and Kandinsky theories, and utilize mixed-effects model to study impact of these features on the painting price. We analyze the influence of the color on the example of the most complex art style - abstractionism, by created Kandinsky, for which the color is the primary basis. We use Itten's theory - the most recognized color theory in art history, from which the largest number of subtheories was born. For this day it is taken as the base for teaching artists. We utilize novel dataset of 3885 paintings collected from Christie's and Sotheby's and find that color harmony has some explanatory power, color complexity metrics are insignificant and color diversity explains price well.

Date: 2022-06, Revised 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.04013 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2206.04013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().