I came across this news article from the BBC website today.
‘Fake’ paintings trick viewers in brain scan test
To sum up it basically says that people seem to get more pleasure looking at a picture if they know it was by a famous artist. The way they tested it was using a newly discovered Rembrandt that most people wouldn’t have known. They showed this picture to people, they told half of them it was a Rembrandt and the other half not. They took brain scans to measure the brain response and the difference was huge.
This got me thinking about the most expensive photograph in the world as of December 2011 (Andreas Gurskey). Would that photograph have made anywhere near as much if he wasn’t reasonably well known. Would anyone have even taken a second look at Tracy Emin’s “My Bed”? This only leaves the question “how do I sell my name?”.