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Revising the canon: How Andy Warhol became the most important American modern artist
David Galenson
Journal of Cultural Economics, September 2025, Pages 381-406
Abstract:
Quantitative analysis of narratives of art history published since 2000 reveals that scholars and critics now judge that Andy Warhol has surpassed Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns as the most important modern American painter. Auction prices indicate that collectors share this opinion. Disaggregation by decade reveals that Warhol first gained clear critical recognition as the leading Pop artist in the 1990s, then as the most important American artist overall in the 2000s. This rise in Warhol’s status appears initially to have been a result of his influence on Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and others in the cohort that transformed the New York art world in the 1980s, and subsequently of his persisting influence on leading artists around the world who have emerged since the 1990s, including Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and Ai Weiwei. Warhol’s many radical conceptual innovations that transformed both the appearance of art and the behavior of artists made him not only the most important American artist, but the most important Western artist overall of the second half of the twentieth century.
You do not get to tell me about sad: Swiftian Saudade in Taylor Swift’s lyrics
Jean Clipperton & Loizos Bitsikokos
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
Song lyrics can be powerful: conveying imagery, emotion, and connecting listeners to a song. Few, if any, songwriters offer a better case study than Grammy-winning pop icon Taylor Swift. Swift, known for her lyricism and shattering Billboard records, has 11 studio albums that she has penned either wholly herself or cowritten with a new album arriving in October 2025. We find that her work invokes what we term Swiftian Saudade -- a mixture of sadness, anticipation, nostalgia, and joy. We combine a lexicon-based approach with principal component analysis of Swift’s song lyrics to analyze her evolution as a songwriter, finding that Swift’s lyrics can be categorized using a two-dimensional landscape of lyrically focused and emotional words. Her work has changed over time, moving from a more lyric-focused place toward one of deep and conflicting emotions, her signature Swiftian Saudade. This is particularly true within track five on her albums: these tracks exhibit the highest rate of saudade elements at nearly 50% and a significantly higher level of authenticity than her other tracks. Our analysis contributes to substantive work on vocal music and on Swift’s songwriting, providing a nuanced approach to understanding the craft of songwriting and emotion in lyrics. We also contribute to methodological approaches to lyrical analyses, providing a novel combination of principal component analysis with lexicon-based analyses that can inform future text-based research.
He sees the forest, I see the trees: Narrative perspective shifts how abstractly people construe a text
Zachary Niese
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, November 2025, Pages 773-787
Abstract:
Humans tell stories to share information, evoke emotions, and change opinions. An inherent dimension of these stories is the narrative perspective from which they are told: Sometimes stories are told from a person’s first-person narrative perspective (e.g., using I/me pronouns), whereas other times, they are told about the person using a third-person narrative perspective (e.g., using he/him, she/her, etc., pronouns). The current work tests the hypothesis that the first-person (vs. third-person) narrative perspective causes people to construe information more concretely (vs. abstractly), with downstream effects on how readers interpret and are influenced by a text. Experiments 1a/1b support this claim by showing that participants construe others’ actions more concretely (vs. abstractly) when those actions are written from the first-person (vs. third-person) narrative perspective. Experiments 2a/2b build on this finding to show that people prefer concrete (vs. abstract) summary descriptions of short narrative stories that are written from the first-person (vs. third-person) narrative perspective. Experiment 3 tests the implications of this effect for persuasion, showing people were more motivated to donate blood when first-person (vs. third-person) donation testimonials were paired with concrete (vs. abstract) arguments for donating. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that narrative perspective influences identification with a character depending on the relatability of the character’s experience. First-person (vs. third-person) narratives increase identification with characters, unless their experiences are too difficult to relate to. These findings provide insight into how narrative perspective influences people’s understanding of a written text, as well as its subsequent influence on attitudes and behaviors.
Multihoming and single-homing complementors' responses to intensified between-platform competition: Evidence from the YouTube–Twitch rivalry
Niloofar Abolfathi
Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines how heterogeneous YouTube content creators-specifically, single-homing and multihoming channels-respond to a sudden increase in the exposure of the rival platform, Twitch. Contrary to expectations, I find that multihoming channels reduce their content creation efforts and underperform relative to single-homers. To make sense of these surprising results, I develop a formal model that characterizes the strategic behavior of different types of complementors operating across two platforms with varying levels of user exposure. The model offers a plausible explanation for the observed empirical patterns, suggesting that intensified competition between platforms, as a consequence of their changing exposure, disproportionately incentivizes single-homers to enhance platform value while discouraging multihomers from maintaining the same level of engagement.
Fractional Ownership and Copyright Licensing: Evidence from the Music Industry
Alberto Galasso & El Hadi Caoui
NBER Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
Creative content is often the product of collaboration, which may lead to fractional ownership of intellectual property. We study the effect of fractional ownership on the licensing of copyrighted material and its reuse. To do so, we compile new data on the copyright ownership structure of songs and their licensing for use in movies. We document that fractional song ownership has increased substantially: the mean number of songwriters and publishers per song has tripled between 1958 and 2021. We show that, conditional on a rich set of controls, greater fractionalization is associated with lower likelihood of licensing. We leverage the Sony-led acquisition of EMI Music Publishing in 2012 to obtain within-song variation in ownership and find that consolidating ownership rights significantly increases licensing, beyond any standalone effects of the merger.
Perimeter-Based Advertising and Fan Characteristics in the NHL and MLB
Monica Fine, Bomi Kang & Andrew Weinbach
American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study analyzes corporate perimeter advertisements (ads displayed around the field of play) in the National Hockey League (NHL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) to determine if the fans of these leagues are presented with similar or differing ads. Variations in the ads should reflect differences in the fan bases. Building on existing literature, 1,169 perimeter ads were categorized into 20 distinct groups. While from a high level, the ads appear generally similar, NHL fans are exposed to significantly more ads promoting business services and light beer, while MLB fans see more ads related to home improvement products and services, as well as regular beer, providing insight into the audiences the advertisers aim to reach.