Being Ranked in a Material World: The visual originality of an artwork and its effects on the artist’s canonization

Originality is widely regarded as a determinant of an artist’s canonization, yet its long-term impact on cultural valuation remains underexplored. In this study, we address this gap by using advanced deep learning methods to gain new theoretical insights into the relationship between artists’ visual originality and their art historical significance. We conceptualize visual originality as the extent to which novelty—expressed solely in the visual features of artworks—affects the overall value of a focal artist, as determined by expert, peer, and market-based evaluative regimes. To empirically examine this relationship, we analyze 60,011 paintings spanning six centuries of fine art using computer vision methods. We also construct a comprehensive dataset and utilize text analysis to quantify the canonical importance of the 942 artists who created these paintings. Additionally, we develop a peer influence metric that gauges the importance of artistic novelty on subsequent artists. Our findings show that visual originality is a significant determinant of artists’ long-term standing in the art canon across all evaluative regimes. Moreover, there is a strong, positive relationship between artists’ visual originality within a stylistic movement and artists’ canonical rankings, particularly for expert and market regimes. Finally, we show that early innovators within a stylistic movement are significantly more likely to attain enduring art historical esteem, underscoring the importance of visual originality at the forefront of emerging artistic trends. Our findings are robust and validated across different contexts and time periods, while our methods extend the use of computational image and text analysis in organization studies research.