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Better off Dead? Prices Realised for Australian Paintings Sold at Auction

Author Info

  • Bronwyn Coate

    ()

    (School of Economics, Finance & Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia)

  • Tim R.L. Fry

    ()

    (School of Economics, Finance & Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia)

Abstract

Using auction sales data on Australian paintings over the period 1995 and 2003 we investigate the relationship between artists´ living status and the price of paintings sold at auction. For deceased artists we consider the time since their death and for living artists their conditional life expectancy. Hedonic regression analysis is applied separately to the data on Indigenous and non-Indigenous paintings. Comparing the modelling results across Indigenous and non-Indigenous paintings we see evidence of two different patterns of response to an artist´s living status. Both yield non-linear impacts but for Indigenous paintings these are quadratic and for non-Indigenous they are quartic. Thus the response to living status in the more recent market for Indigenous paintings is different to the more established market for non-Indigenous paintings. Whilst the responses differ for the two types of paintings, in answer to the question posed and in terms of the price of a painting at auction an artist is better off long dead or close to death.

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File URL: http://www.culturaleconomics.org/awp/AWP-02-2012.pdf
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Paper provided by Association for Cultural Economics International in its series ACEI Working Paper Series with number AWP-02-2012.

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Length: 28 pages
Date of creation: Feb 2012
Date of revision: Feb 2012
Handle: RePEc:cue:wpaper:awp-02-2012
Contact details of provider: Web page: http://www.culturaleconomics.org/
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Keywords: Australian paintings; Indigenous paintings; auction prices; death; conditional life expectancy;

Find related papers by JEL classification:

  • Z11 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economics of the Arts and Literature

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  1. Victor Ginsburgh & David Throsby, 2006. "Handbook of the Eonomics of Art and Culture," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/152412, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
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Cited by:

  1. J. N. Lye and J. G. Hirschberg, 2012. "Inverse Test Confidence Intervals for Turning points: A," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 1160, The University of Melbourne.
  2. Ventura Charlin & Arturo Cifuentes, 2013. "A new financial metric for the art market," Papers 1309.6929, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2015.

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