[BretLudwig]

Cezanne vs. Picasso vs. Gladwell

"I was going to comment on a recent lecture New Yorker writer Malcolm
Gladwell gave to a conference of high school math teachers on how some
students are like Picasso and everything comes quickly to them, while
others are like Cezanne, where it takes them a long time before they
become geniuses.

I came up with a theory about why he chose those particular analogies for
math students, but then Google showed that in reality he's been wedging
Picasso v. Cezanne into just about any of his recent speeches, no matter
what the subject: oldies Classic Rock (see, the Eagles were like Picasso,
while Fleetwood Mac was like Cezanne); American health care policy
("Gladwell: Health-care system needs Cezanne, not Picasso or Michael
Moore"); and how to run your corporate R&D department ("Is Your Company a
Cezanne or a Picasso?")
Nice work if you can get it!

The back story is that Malcolm developed his latest crush on a professor,
U. of Chicago economist David W. Galenson, and wrote an article about
Galenson's theory that there are two types of artists: quick-blooming
conceptualists and slow-blooming experimentalists. Gladwell's article was
evidently so silly that, despite Gladwell's huge popularity, the New
Yorker rejected it, so Gladwell has been recycling it in speeches.

Enough about Gladwell. Let's take a look at Galenson's website:

"When in their lives do great artists produce their greatest art? Do
they strive for creative perfection throughout decades of painstaking and
frustrating experimentation, or do they achieve it confidently and
decisively, through meticulous planning that yields masterpieces early in
their lives?

By examining the careers not only of great painters but also of
important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors, Old Masters
and Young Geniuses offers a profound new understanding of artistic
creativity. Using a wide range of evidence, David Galenson demonstrates
that there are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and
that each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over a
lifetime.

Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their
major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual
innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at
an early age. Galenson shows why such artists as Michelangelo, Rembrandt,
Cézanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred
Hitchcock were experimental old masters, and why Vermeer, van Gogh,
Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles were
conceptual young geniuses. He also explains how this changes our
understanding of art and its past.

Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find."

Galenson has supposedly collected a lot of quantitative information on
sales prices and the like to determine when various artists peaked That
kind of thing is always fun. (Although, I haven't actually seen his data.
Commenters pointed me toward graph guru Edward Tufte's site -- he has read
Galenson's book but didn't see any sales price data in it. Auction price
data sounds like the kind of thing you'd have to massage a lot to make
usable, adjusting for size of paintings and market levels, which means you
could also massage it into giving the results you wanted if you weren't
careful with yourself.).

That's not a bad little dichotomy, but it's more useful in comparing
disciplines -- theoretical physicists tend to be young when they make
their breakthroughs and historians tend to be old when they write their
big books summing it all up, such as Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to
Decadence, published when he was 94.

In other professions, it's mostly cost that drives peak ages: architects
tend to be old when their most famous buildings are built because
buildings are too expensive to be entrusted to whippersnappers. In
contrast, great three chord rock songs are written by young men because it
barely costs anything besides time, when they have all the time in the
world.

But back to Galenson's central interest: art. There are of course, obvious
limitations on his quantitative approach: there's not exactly an active
market in Michelangelo's masterpieces. ("Sheldon Adelson bought the
Sistine Chapel today for $18.1 billion from Larry Ellison, who paid only
$15.3 billion for it in 2006. Adelson says the Sistine Chapel will serve
as the lobby of his new Vatican Vegas Hotel & Casino, which he's opening
on the Strip in 2010.")

I haven't read Galenson's book, but his own blurb for it isn't
confidence-inducing. Why is Michelangelo an "old master" rather than a
young innovator? He carved his Pieta before he was 25 and his David, the
most famous sculpture of all time, the most stunning single objet d'art
I've ever seen, before he was 30. On the other hand, he painted the Last
Judgment in the Sistine chapel when in his sixties and redid the
architecture of St. Peter's when in his seventies.

How can we account for this incredibly long and productive career?

Because he was Michelangelo.

This is a little like asking how Ted Williams could hit .388 with power
and walks when he was 38 years old. It's because he could hit .406 with
power and walks when he was 22. And vice-versa. He was Ted Williams, the
greatest hitter of his generation.

Bill James had a nice little graph about the basic reason why some
baseball players had long careers and others had short careers. Here's my
version of it:

The horizontal axis is age, the vertical axis is a made-up measure of
player value to a major league team. The purple line at value 10 is how
good you have to be to be a starter in the big leagues.

So, Lance Long, the red line, is such a hot-shot prospect that he gets a
few major league at-bats in September when's 18. He cracks the starting
lineup at 21. He peaks at 27 like the average ballplayer, and he stays a
starter through 39. He spends 40 as pinch-hitter and tries one more season
at 41, but retires in May.

The career of Sid Short, the green line, follows almost exactly the same
arc but most of it is spent in the minors or on the bench simply because
he's not as good as Lance Long. He has a nice big league career, starting
in the majors from 24 through 31, but as his body deteriorates, he's on
the bench, then back to Triple A, then maybe bouncing around a Mexican
league before he faces the inevitable and calls it quits.

Now, there are other factors that affect a player's career arc. For
example, all else being equal, a smart player like Pedro Martinez is more
likely to outlast a dumb player like Pedro Guerrero. A fast player at age
20 is more likely to find some place in the lineup at age 35 than a
moderate-speed player who may be too slow by 35 for the big leagues. With
alcoholics, not surprisingly, the second half of the career tends to be
disappointing compared to the first half (e.g., Eddie Matthews, Mickey
Mantle, Jimmie Foxx)

Injuries obviously play a role, but once again they interact with talent.
If you are Ernie Banks, two-time MVP power-hitting shortstop, and you
permanently hobble yourself mid-career, they switch you to first base. If
you are a journeyman with the same injury, though, they might find you an
assistant coach job in the minor leagues if they're feeling benevolent.

With artists, the single biggest variable is age of death. For example,
two of Galenson's young bucks are Vermeer, who died at 43, and and Van
Gogh, who died at 37.

In one of his papers, he writes:

"There have been two very different life cycles for great artists:
some have made their greatest contributions very early in their careers,
whereas others have produced their best work late in their lives. These
two patterns have been associated with different working methods, as art's
young geniuses have worked deductively to make conceptual innovations,
while its old masters have worked inductively, to innovate experimentally.
We demonstrate the value of this typology by considering the careers of
four great conceptual innovators - Masaccio, Raphael, Picasso, and Johns -
and five great experimental innovators - Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt,
Cezanne, and Pollock."

Okay, but Masaccio, who introduced perspective to painting in Florence in
1425 died at 27 and Raphael died at 37. Maybe Masaccio just was in the
right place at the right time, although people who know far more about art
than I do assume he would have had a long, tremendous career if he'd lived.
If Masaccio had lived, a decade or two later, he might have been the first
great Italian to use oil paint, and then he'd be so famous today as the
most revolutionary painter of all time that he'd be one of the Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles.

And there's nothing in Raphael's character that suggests he was a
one-trick pony. If he'd lived a long time, he'd probably have had a career
like Titian's, only even better.

Finally, there's the historic shift at the beginning of the 20th Century
from fine art to what Paul Johnson calls "fashion art." Raphael was the
epitome of the fine artist, whose skills were objectively superior. Jasper
Johns is the epitome of the fashion artist who figures out the next wave of
fashion and cashes in big time.

Johns had the first show of Pop Art in 1958. See, he'd figured out that
collectors were bored with Abstract Expressionist paintings. They wanted
to buy paintings that were, at least, pictures of something. But the
reigning dogma of the 20th Century was that paintings that used
perspective, that created an illusion of 3-d space, a window into a
made-up universe, were a fraud. A painting was just a flat surface with
paint on it. You shouldn't make up a little story about what was happening
in it: "Maybe Mona Lisa looks both happy and sad because ..." No! It's just
a flat thing with paint on it.

But, still, pure abstraction was kind of boring ...

In The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe summarizes critic Leo Steinberg's epochal
explication of what Johns had "accomplished."

"The new theory went as follows. Johns had chosen real subjects such
as flags and numbers and letters and targets that were flat by their very
nature. They were born to be flat, you might say. Thereby Johns was
achieving an amazing thing. He was bringing real subjects into Modern
painting but in a way that neither violated the law of Flatness nor
introduced "literary" content."

Trust me, if Raphael had felt like painting a flag, it would be a better
flag painting than any by Jasper Johns.

Finally, back to Picasso and Cezanne. How is it that Cezanne's paintings
from the last decade of his career are his most expensive today, and
Picasso's paintings from the first decade of his career are the most
expensive? Well, it was basically the same decade -- the first of the 20th
Century. That's when the Big Switch happened, so the most historically
important paintings from both Cezanne and Picasso come from almost the
same time.

What happened in the first decade of the 20th Century was that after 475
years, people were getting bored with perspective; and painters were
increasingly worried about photography. Pretty soon, those *******s would
have color film and then you could take pictures that looked like what Jan
van Eyck was doing in the 1430s in the Low Countries when he got
perspective from Italy and oil paint from Norway. And then who is going to
hire a painter?

This led to the happy ending of Cezanne's life. Cezanne could never quite
get the hang of perspective, which had been the basic barrier to entry for
professional painters since the 15th Century. All of his pictures just kind
of looked "off." Normally, people who tried their hand at painting but
couldn't master perspective gave up and did something else with their
lives. It's like a professional baseball player who can't hit a 90 mph
fastball or a singer who can't stay on key -- they're best advised to go
get a real job and most of them eventually do.

But Cezanne was a dogged sort, who really loved painting, even if he
wasn't very good at it. So, he kept at it and at it, and he actually got
better at the other stuff, like color.

Eventually, though, people in the art business, like young Picasso,
decided "Who cares about perspective anymore? It's been done." And they
looked around for a role model to give some credence, some sense of
historical development to this new fashion, and, there was poor old
Cezanne, still hard at it. And, you know, if you kind of squinted and
ignored the fact that his paintings looked out-of-kilter, they were pretty
good! And, in fact, since paintings had been in-kilter since Masaccio, but
now the damn photographers were just pressing a button and making
in-kilter pictures, you could argue that Cezanne's out-of-kilterness made
his poor old paintings not just good, but great! (That was the point, of
course -- the art world wanted paintings that you wouldn't get unless
you'd heard the theory already. Everything else could be left to
photography.)

So, what does Cezanne have to do with math students? Maybe if some kid
just doesn't have the knack for the Quadratic Formula, he should just keep
plugging away until the Quadratic Formula goes out of fashion!"

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/c...-gladwell.html

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