Why We’ll Invest in a Banksy

In October 2013, a pop-up vendor selling small spray-painted canvases appeared in Manhattan’s Central Park. It took four hours for the vendor to make his first sale: two canvases, bargained down to half the price, sold for $30 each. The day’s buyers and passersby didn’t know that the pictures were Banksy originals, spray-painted by the legendary graffiti artist, each one worth at least $150,000 on the art market. The setup was part of a series of unannounced appearances the artist and his work made across New York City.

Banksy’s experiment sheds a spotlight on how we think about artwork, which is at the heart of research by Daniel Bartels, assistant professor of marketing and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at Chicago Booth, and George E. Newman and Rosanna K. Smith of Yale University’s School of Management. Their findings indicate that people see art less like they do most objects and more like they do people. How you think about a spray-painted Banksy canvas less closely resembles how you think about, say, a bottle of spray paint, and more closely resembles how you think about Banksy himself.

Artworks are different than tools

A few years before Banksy’s New York residency, Bartels and his team became interested in how people think about art, compared to how they think about other physical objects. Artists have long pondered this question. Almost a century ago, the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp bought a porcelain urinal, turned it on its side, signed it “R. Mutt 1917,” gave it the name Fountain, and submitted it to an art exhibition. While initially rejected, Fountain is now widely considered a landmark sculpture of the 20th century. In 1961, Piero Manzoni filled 90 tin cans with his own excrement, labeled it Merda d’Artista, and sold it by weight for the price of gold.

“We thought it would be interesting to test whether people think the same way about all physical objects or whether art has a special status,” Bartels says. And they tested this through an experiment using a made-up object they called “Tamble.” Tamble, the researchers told participants in a study, had been made by a college student, who first built a wax model, then created a rubber mold of the model. He then poured liquid plastic into the mold to create the object—an action that he or someone else could repeat to create replicas of the original.

The researchers asked participants if a replica would be the same object as the original—if it were to be made by the student, and if it were to be made by someone else. They also told half the participants Tamble was a “sculpture,” while they told the other half it was a “tool.”

The researchers find that the art label changed how people thought about versions of the object over time. Participants’ responses indicated that a tool, when replicated, was the same as the original—a replica is Tamble, just as the original was.

But when considering a work of art that had been touched and created by an artist, they thought differently about that object. When people considered Tamble art, they were less likely to judge some reproductions to be Tamble.

The power of magical contagion

Previous research has provided clues as to how this difference in perception might happen: much of the essence of art is related to the physical contact it has with the artist who conceived of it.

Various cultures have believed a person’s essence can rub off on and contaminate objects when touched by that person, a concept known as “magical contagion.” Religious relics such as Jesus’s sandal and the Prophet Muhammad’s footprint represent one kind of magical contagion. More contemporary examples can be found in celebrity memorabilia. The more famous the person, the more contagious their essence on objects. In 2008, a tissue used by the actress Scarlett Johansson sold on eBay for $5,300. “Nicholas Cage’s toothbrush is valuable because he’s touched it,” says Bartels, offering a hypothetical example. “He didn’t create it, but people might act as though, in some sense, there’s part of him in the object.”

Imagine how potent this concept is when the object in question was created by the person it’s associated with, says Bartels. “People tend to think about artwork as the end point of a ‘creative performance,’” the researchers write. We have a degree of personal attachment to such objects, seeing art as a physical extension of the person who made it.

Labeling Duchamp’s urinal as art eventually increased its value, but it took a recognized artist to give the object that exalted status. “If I have my dirty sock on the floor and you say, ‘That’s art,’ people will say, ‘Who cares?’” says Newman. “It has to do with our belief that it came in contact with Duchamp and he is able to imbue it with some Duchamp-ness that ordinary urinals are not able to have.”

This, too, was affirmed by the Tamble study. When people considered Tamble art, they were more likely to say that a reproduction made by the artist, rather than a copy made by someone else, was Tamble.

But if we treat art differently than objects, what do we treat it like? The answer, according to the researchers: people. The researchers suggest that we think about the continuity of people and art in similar ways.

How we think about the continuity of people

In thinking this, they built on earlier research by Newman, Booz Allen’s Sergey Blok, and Northwestern University’s Lance J. Rips. In a 2005 study that at times resembles science fiction, the researchers told participants a story about the future, at a time when scientists would be able to grow human bodies, except for brains, and would keep a stock of frozen bodies for emergencies. In this distant future, an accountant named Jim became severely injured, and his body practically destroyed. His only chance of survival involved transplanting his brain into a stock body.

The researchers told a few versions of this story. They told one group that after transplanting Jim’s brain, doctors found that his memories remained stored there. They told another group Jim’s memories were found to be gone. Asked to rate whether the transplant recipient remained Jim, those told that his memories were intact gave a rating of 6.6 (out of 9), while the others gave a rating of 2. This suggests, according to the research, that continuity of memories is considered important to the continuity of identity.

The continuity of Jim’s physical “stuff,” his brain in particular, was also considered part of his identity. Participants said that if Jim’s memories were intact but stored in a computer rather than his brain, that wouldn’t be the same.

In a less fantastic example, Bartels references the well-publicized case of Terri Schiavo, who spent 15 years on life support in a vegetative state. A court case pitted Schiavo’s husband against her parents, who fought over whether to remove Schiavo’s feeding tube. The court permitted its removal, deciding that Schiavo wasn’t the same person in a vegetative state as she had been when conscious. “Her psychology changed so much that people wouldn’t say she was the same person that she was before,” Bartels says.

What do Schiavo and Jim have to do with art? People consider the sameness of brains, body parts, and psychology when judging identity, and this sameness shouldn’t matter as much when it comes to objects that lack mental states. However, a second study done by the researchers suggests we use similar judgments when it comes to assessing art objects. The researchers showed participants a painting and told them either that the artist had spent weeks painting it himself or that he had given instructions to an assistant who had painted it for him. When people believed the artist had created it himself, they were more likely to think of a replica as maintaining the essence of the original than when told an assistant had painted it under the artist’s supervision. Given an opportunity to explain their reasoning, participants said that because the artist hadn’t touched or seen the replica, it could not be the original. But people told an assistant was involved didn’t feel the same. “He did not paint the original painting so the duplicate is not missing the element of him being the painter,” wrote one participant.

Over time, a person can change—whether because of an accident, disease, age, or death, among other reasons. An artwork can also change, as it is reproduced, altered, damaged, or lost. Other kinds of inanimate objects can change, too, in the same ways as an artwork. But when this change occurs, people observing or told of the change might rethink whether the postchange object or person is the same as the original. They reevaluate a person and an artwork similarly, factoring in the essence of the person or artwork—something they don’t consider for other kinds of inanimate objects.

“We have intuitions about the continuity of people and other kinds of one-of-a-kind objects,” says Bartels. “People make judgments about artworks, about how a later artwork is like an earlier artwork, much as they make judgments about people . . . And the specific views that people adopt, about whether the later thing is the same thing as the original, can affect even very practically important things, like, for example, some kinds of end-of-life issues brought to the fore in the US several years ago in the Terry Schiavo case.”

That is why a urinal associated with Duchamp and considered sculpture can be worth more than one you may be able to buy at a bath store. Although Fountain was lost, when we judge the reproductions and photos that survive, we factor in the links that exist to the artist.

Similarly, fans around the world flock to see Banksy’s ephemeral graffiti on buildings, before it can be painted over, defaced, or removed. Last summer, a person who spent $120 for two prints she later learned were Banksy originals sold them for $208,000 at auction. The works of art didn’t physically change, but the knowledge that Banksy himself made them elevated their status instantly, taking them from bathroom art to the auction block.