Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were key figures in the resurgence of expressive figurative painting in the late twentieth century. All three made personal visual art, drawing their subjects from among the people and things they cared most about. Yet they worked in very...

A number of psychologists have concluded that creativity is primarily the domain of the young. Recent research has shown that this is wrong. Conceptual innovators make sudden radical innovative leaps, early in their careers. But experimental innovators work incrementally to develop new methods...

Art experts have disagreed about whether art markets accurately reflect artistic importance. This paper uses published surveys of art history to construct a critical ranking of the 30 most important American painters of the last century, then uses auction records to identify the most expensive...

Experimental entrepreneurship is often overlooked: experimentalists are less flamboyant than their conceptual peers, and their innovations arrive gradually and less conspicuously. Experimentalists work patiently to innovate, proceeding by trial and error in pursuit of ambitious but often...

Quantitative analysis of narratives of art history published since 2000 reveals that scholars and critics now judge that Andy Warhol has surpassed Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns as the most important modern American painter. Auction prices suggest that collectors share this opinion....