We analyze the Paris art market between the government-controlled Salon as a centralized organization of art exhibition and the system liberalized by the Republican government based on competition between independent exhibitions. The jury of the old Salon decided on submissions with a bias...

We provide evidence of a cubic law of art prices that hints to a general pattern for the distribution of artistic talent. The persistence across heterogeneous markets from historical ones to contemporary art auctions of a power law in the distribution of the average price per artist suggests the...

Art history may be at a turning point in the adoption of a quantitative approach typical of social sciences, and this book is a brilliant manifesto for this. It will be a fascinating reading for economic historians and cultural economists, and will hopefully foster interdisciplinary research,...

We study return rates on art investment using a complete dataset on repeated sales for Old Master Paintings, Modern art and Contemporary art auctioned worldwide at Christie's and Sotheby's from 2000 to 2018. We show that return rates do not depend systematically on past prices or the place of...