Resch’s “Quantifying Success and Reputation in Art” was a landmark in network science. It was also something of a coup. The 2018 whitepaper, published in Science, makes the claim that art has nothing to do with history, just as value has nothing to do with money. Success in art isn’t even about aesthetics. Art, the paper argues, is but a network effect. Maybe it’s patriarchy, maybe it’s privilege: the paper demon - strates that the value of a work of art is determined entirely by its context, and because art has no usevalue, its value is quantifiable only in terms of the market-institutional feedback loops between a small group of major institutions and the slightly less-small pool of artists they trade on. Surplus value, like privilege, is apparently a prerequisite: “Recognition”, the paper claims, is “external from the work itself.”
68