Artworks without names: an insight into the market for anonymous paintings

Abstract

This paper explores the market for indeterminate works of art. Our data set includes 1578 sales of fifteenth and sixteenth-century anonymous Flemish paintings, mainly collected from the Blouin Art Sales Index over the period 1955-2015. After a brief introductory section to the issue of anonymity in early modern art, and the different situations of information failure generated by anonymous paintings, the empirical part examines the supply and demand for paintings by unrecorded artists, using a hedonic pricing model. We find evidence that the degree of specification of the spatio-temporal designations given to the paintings (e.g. Flemish school, sixteenth century) affect prices differently (H1). The more specific the designation is in time and space, the more it tends to make up for the lack of information, and to positively affect the market value of anonymous paintings. When the artist name is missing, we also argue that purchasers pay greater attention to other quality signals. Four other hypotheses, which are expected to influence the buyer's willingness to pay, are successively tested: H2) the physical condition of the painting; H3) oral or written interventions by an expert; H4) the length of the lot essay; and H5) previous attributions to named artists. The results suggest that most of these variables operate as significant pricing characteristics. We finally compare price indices of named artists, indirect names and spatio-temporal designations.

The art of valuation: Using visual analysis to price classical paintings by Swedish Masters

“…For artist characteristics, we consider gender and whether the given painting is signed [34,38,39]. Furthermore, we also include artist fixed effects to account for artists' reputation and other personal traits [5,34,40,41]. For painting characteristics, we control for theme, technique, and painting size (see e.g., [3,34].…”

“…This shows that paintings with this theme have the highest mean hammer price; the mean (median) hammer price for nudes is SEK 2,101,500 (360,000). Portraits are next with a mean (median) hammer price of SEK 319,600 (41,300). Object paintings rank third with a mean (median) hammer price of SEK 213,700 (34,200).…”

A Trade-off Between the Artistic Aesthetic Value and Market Value of Paintings With Naïve and Childlike Interest Complex

“…First, this study goes beyond the existing literature by providing fresh insight into the relationship between the artistic aesthetic value and market value of paintings with naïve and childlike interest complex. Several previous studies focus on the aesthetic value of paintings (e.g., Armstrong, 2010; Balmer, 2021) or market value of paintings (e.g., Ma, Noussair, & Renneboog, 2022; Radermecher, 2019), while few studies (e.g., Aznar & Guijiarro, 2007) have explored the relationship between the two, especially in the narrow field of paintings with naïve and childlike interest complex. In this study, we attempt to identify pathways or configurations that can unify the artistic aesthetic value and market value from the point of view of the creation of such paintings.…”

Artist Names as Human Brands: Brand Determinants, Creation and co-Creation Mechanisms

“…Artist human brands have been studied mainly in theoretical frameworks (Marshall & Forrest, 2011;Preece & Kerrigan, 2015;Angelini & Castellani, 2021), with the only exception of the empirical work by Kucharska and Mikołajczak (2018), and through artist case studies, such as the analysis of the brand of Pablo Picasso (Muñiz, Norris, & Fine, & A, 2014), Andy Warhol (Kerrigan, Brownlie, Hewer, & Daza-LeTouze, 2011), Ai Weiwei (Preece, 2015), Marina Abramovic ́ (Marcus, 2015), Thomas Kinkade (Fillis, 2015), and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Weikop, 2012). A cultural economics approach to this information issue has only recently been developed, focusing on the Flemish old masters (Oosterlinck & Radermecker, 2019;Radermecker, 2019Radermecker, , 2020.…”