We empirically analyze the illicit trade in cultural property and antiques, taking advantage of different reporting incentives between source and destination countries. We thus generate a measure of illicit trafficking in these goods based on the difference between imports recorded in United...

Aggregate art price patterns mask a lot of underlying variation--both in the time series and in the cross- section. We argue that, to increase our understanding of the market for aesthetics, it is helpful to take a micro perspective on the formation of art prices, and acknowledge that each...

For 35 leading painters who lived in France during the first century of modern art, this paper uses textbook illustrations as the basis for measuring the importance of both painters and individual paintings. The rankings pose an interesting puzzle: why do some of the greatest artists not produce...

In 1958, the French philosopher Etienne Gilson observed that "painters are related to manual laborers by a deep-rooted affinity that nothing can eliminate," because painting was the one art in which the person who conceives the work is also necessarily the person who executes it. Conceptual...

Words have appeared in visual art since classical times, but until the modern era their use was generally restricted to a few specific functions. In the early twentieth century, the Cubists Braque and Picasso began using words in their paintings and collages in entirely new ways, and their...

American historians of modern art routinely assume that after World War II New York replaced Paris as the center of the western art world. An analysis of the illustrations in French textbooks shows that French art scholars disagree: they rate Jean Dubuffet as the most important painter of the...

Although art museums do not pay any substantial taxes, they are greatly affected by various U.S. tax rules. The individual receives a deduction for donations of art to museums, the estate gets a deduction for bequests, and the corporation gets a deduction for charitable gifts. Art museums also...

The recent history of modern art provides clues as to how important artists can be identified before their work becomes generally known. Advanced art has been dominated by conceptual innovators since the late 1950s, and the importance of formal art education in the training of leading artists...

Psychologists have found that the age at which successful practitioners typically do their best work varies across professions, but they have not considered whether these peak ages change over time, as economic models suggest they might. Using auction records, we estimate the relationship...

Paris was the undisputed capital of modern art in the nineteenth century, but during the earlytwentieth century major innovations began to occur elsewhere in Europe. This paper examines thecareers of the artists who led such movements as Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, Holland'sDe Stijl,...