Chasing Immortality: Artist Reputation after Death

Does artist reputation change after death? This paper analyzes the reputation of 3,000 famous artists---including painters, architects, musicians, and writers---before and after their death. To do so, we constructed a large historical text database using nearly two centuries of newspapers and applied the latest machine learning technique on it. Specifically, we built separate word embedding models for each time period and used them to measure how each artist’s perceived reputation shifts over time. We find that most artists reach the highest point in their reputation right before their death, after which point their reputation starts to decline. The decline is the greatest for those with a higher reputation in their lifetime. In addition, dying young and unexpectedly reduce some of the post-death declines in reputation. To understand the mechanism, we examined painters in our sample and showed that changing taste of genre explains as much as 30 percent of artists’ posthumous decline in reputation. These findings challenge the popular belief that there is a posthumous rise in artist reputation.

Zoom link: https://eur-nl.zoom.us/j/94432291623?pwd=c2d6MnFiVDhHdFpNUlJaVXFJZmkrQT09