A new analysis of Modern and contemporary auction results has come to the conclusion that the size of an artist’s signature correlates to his or her success: the bigger, the better. For Yi Zhou, a professor at the college of business at Florida State University, the larger an artist’s signed name on his or her work, the greater their personal narcissism. Narcissistic artists do better at auction, Yi found. She analysed data for auctions that took place between 1980 and 2012. Signatures that were larger than those of most artists are associated with market prices about 25% higher among Modern artists and 13% among contemporary artists. Her report, Narcissism and the art market performance, appeared last month in The European Journal of Finance, published by Taylor & Francis.
