If you assume that the world’s most famous artists, actors, and influencers are simply the most creative in their field, think again. There’s another factor at play: social networks. A new paper aims to show that greater creativity does not translate into an increased level of fame. Fame correlates statistically to the diversity of your personal and professional networks; it is based on the company you keep, not your product. By extension, who you know informs how people see you. The more cosmopolitan your networks, the more creative people perceive you to be, legitimizing you as an innovator and yielding more widespread fame.
Peer network of the artists in “Inventing Abstraction.” Courtesy of Paul Ingram and Mitali Banerjee.
In “Fame as an Illusion of Creativity: Evidence from the Pioneers of Abstract Art,”Paul Ingram, Chazen Senior Scholar at Columbia Business School, and Mitali Banerjee, Assistant Professor at HEC Paris, examine the link between fame, creativity, and social networks
ABSTRACT: " We build a social structural model of fame, which departs from the atomistic view of prior literature where creativity is the sole driver of fame in creative markets. We test the model in a significant empirical context: 90 pioneers of the early 20th century (1910–25) abstract art movement. We find that an artist in a brokerage rather than a closure position was likely to become more famous. This effect was not, however, associated with the artist’s creativity, which we measured using both objective computational methods and subjective expert evaluations, and which was not itself related to fame. Rather than creativity, brokerage networks were associated with cosmopolitan identities—broker’s alters were likely to differ more from each other’s nationalities–and this was the key social-structural driver of fame. -Chazen and Banerjee
ORIGINAL PAPER: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3258318