David Galenson, a professor of economics at the prestigious University of Chicago, has become renowned as the father of the Conceptual vs. Experimental Theory of Creativity. In a career that began as an economic historian, Galenson primarily focused on the productivity and economic life cycles within the American labor market. While his research offered a glimpse into what drives the human mind, it wasn't until years later while buying a painting that Galenson became fascinated by the creative side of human thinking.

Intrigued by the work of classic and contemporary artists alike, he began to explore the life cycles and careers of such artists as Picasso and Cezanne in a quest to discover what drove each to produce excellent work. Using quantitative evidence taken from auction records, art history textbooks, and exhibitions, he discovered that great artists are divided into two distinct life patterns. They are either "conceptual innovators," who make incredible dramatic leaps in their disciplines when they are young, or "experimental innovators," who draw on a lifetime of trial and error before producing their best work.

Galenson decided to carry his thesis further and found that this Conceptual vs. Experimental Theory of Creativity applied to other arts and nearly all intellectual activities. Though initially met with resistance, his ideas have since gained momentum and acclaim, described by Wired magazine's Daniel Pink as "a unified field theory of creativity," and by The Tipping Point's Malcolm Gladwell as having "important implications."

Galenson's books, Painting Outside the Lines, Old Masters and Young Geniuses, Artistic Capital and Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art, all elaborate on his intriguing theory. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue his research, and his attempt to statistically rank the great artwork of the 20th century has been profiled by The New York Times. With an enthralling body of work that, according to author Don Thompson, "goes further in using innovative methods of analysis…than anyone I know," Galenson's research may not only allow us to gain a better understanding of our own intellectual development, but may ultimately help us all to become more creative.

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Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity

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, this presentation 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.

Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art

From Picasso’s Cubism and Duchamp’s readymades to Warhol’s silkscreens and Smithson’s earthworks, the art of the twentieth century broke completely with earlier artistic traditions. A basic change in the market for advanced art produced a heightened demand for innovation, and young conceptual innovators – from Picasso and Duchamp to Rauschenberg and Warhol to Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst – responded not only by creating dozens of new forms of art, but also by behaving in ways that would have been incomprehensible to their predecessors.

In this talk, Galenson presents the first systematic analysis of the reasons for this discontinuity. He combines social scientific methods with qualitative analysis to produce a fundamentally new interpretation of modern art that will give listeners a far deeper appreciation of the art of the past century and of today, than is available anywhere else.

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