102. “The Starry Night”

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things: Episode 102 - “The Starry Night”

Hosted by Freakonomics Network & Zachary Crockett

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Introduction

In Episode 102 of The Economics of Everyday Things, journalist Zachary Crockett delves into the fascinating journey and enduring legacy of Vincent van Gogh's iconic masterpiece, "The Starry Night." Hosted in collaboration with Glenn Lowry, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, this episode explores the painting's historical significance, its elusive valuation, and the meticulous efforts required to preserve such an invaluable work of art.

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The Journey of "The Starry Night"

The episode begins with a vivid description of "The Starry Night," highlighting its mesmerizing depiction of a celestial night sky over a quiet village. Glenn Lowry emphasizes the painting's unique allure:

"There is no equivalent. There are other Van Goghs that have sold, but they're not the Van Gogh that has brought millions of people a year to the Museum of Modern Art." [01:32]

Zachary Crockett narrates the tumultuous history of the painting, from Van Gogh's struggle with mental health and his untimely death to the painting's journey through various owners. Jo Van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent's sister-in-law, played a pivotal role in promoting his legacy by selling his works to ensure their preservation and appreciation.

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Valuing the Masterpiece

A central theme of the episode revolves around the challenging task of assigning a monetary value to "The Starry Night." While Van Gogh's paintings can fetch tens of millions at auctions today, "The Starry Night" remains unsold and housed permanently at MoMA. Glenn Lowry acknowledges the complexity of valuing such an iconic piece:

"If you tried to value it today, there's no way you could put a number on it that would make any sense." [09:53]

Exploring hypothetical valuations, Crockett compares the painting's worth to other masterpieces, suggesting it could be valued at $27 million based on historical exchanges involving works by Cezanne and Toulouse-Lautrec. However, Lowry contends that "The Starry Night" transcends such comparisons, becoming an invaluable cornerstone of modern art.

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Security and Conservation

Protecting "The Starry Night" involves elaborate and resource-intensive measures. Glenn Lowry details the comprehensive security protocols in place, likening the gallery to an operating theater:

"The climate is controlled to an incredible degree. We try and maintain temperature around 72, 73 degrees, and we try and maintain relative humidity between 45 and 55%." [17:58]

The painting is housed within a specially designed frame that acts as a protective box, safeguarding it against environmental factors and potential physical threats. Additionally, MoMA employs advanced climate control and filtration systems to ensure the painting's preservation. Regular inspections by conservationists help monitor and address any signs of deterioration.

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Impact on MoMA and the Public

Since its acquisition in 1941 through a strategic exchange involving three other significant paintings, "The Starry Night" has become one of MoMA's most treasured exhibits, attracting approximately 3 million visitors annually. Lowry reflects on the painting's role in drawing diverse audiences:

"There's no doubt in my mind that a significant percentage of our visitors are attracted to the Museum of Modern Art because they know that they will see Starry Night here." [09:47]

The painting's universal appeal and emotional depth have cemented its status as a cultural icon, influencing not only art enthusiasts but also popular culture worldwide.

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Preservation Challenges and Public Access

While reproductions of "The Starry Night" are widely available, MoMA maintains strict control over high-resolution images to manage their use and licensing. Lowry explains the balance between public access and preservation:

"We own the painting. We do not own the copyright. The copyright was originally owned by the family. But now, because the painting is as old as it is, it's in the public domain." [21:22]

Efforts to loan the painting for international exhibitions are rare and involve meticulous planning to mitigate any risks during transit. Such stringent measures ensure that "The Starry Night" remains protected while still being accessible to a global audience in select instances.

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Conclusion

"The Starry Night" serves as a testament to Vincent van Gogh's genius and the enduring power of art to inspire and captivate. Through detailed discussions with MoMA's Glenn Lowry, Zachary Crockett illuminates the intricate economics behind preserving and valuing such an iconic masterpiece. This episode not only celebrates the painting's beauty but also underscores the collective effort required to maintain its legacy for future generations.

For more insights into the hidden economics of everyday phenomena, tune into future episodes of "The Economics of Everyday Things."

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Notable Quotes

• "There is no equivalent. There are other Van Goghs that have sold, but they're not the Van Gogh that has brought millions of people a year to the Museum of Modern Art." — Glenn Lowry [01:32]

• "If you tried to value it today, there's no way you could put a number on it that would make any sense." — Glenn Lowry [09:53]

• "The climate is controlled to an incredible degree. We try and maintain temperature around 72, 73 degrees, and we try and maintain relative humidity between 45 and 55%." — Glenn Lowry [17:58]

• "There's no doubt in my mind that a significant percentage of our visitors are attracted to the Museum of Modern Art because they know that they will see Starry Night here." — Glenn Lowry [09:47]

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Produced by Morgan Levy and Sarah Lilly | Mixed by Jeremy Johnston | Special Thanks to Daniel Moritz Rapson

Transcript

[Glenn Lowry]

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[Glenn Lowry]

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[Zachary Crockett]

Mobile.Com network on WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this. So whether you're sharing the streaming password in the family chat or trading those late night voice messages that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately every year, people come from all over the world to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It's home to some of the world's most famous works, like Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans and Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel sculpture. But but you'll probably find the biggest crowds gathered around an oil painting on the fifth floor. It was created in the south of France in the summer of 1889.

[Glenn Lowry]

So Starry Night is a unicorn. It's an extraordinary painting by an extraordinary artist that kind of escapes the force field of any normal description.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Glenn Lowry. Vincent van Gogh's painting the Starry Night is in his care.

[Glenn Lowry]

I'm the director of the Museum of Modern Art.

[Zachary Crockett]

You can probably conjure an image of the Starry Night in your mind. Maybe you've seen it on a T shirt, a poster, or an umbrella. Or maybe you've stood in front of it at the Museum of Modern Art, better known as moma.

[Glenn Lowry]

It depicts a starry night with a glowing yellowish gold moon off in the upper right, swirling blue white clouds in the background, a tall twisting cypress tree in the lower left foreground, and a village in the distance.

[Zachary Crockett]

Van Gogh painted the landscape when he was hospitalized in an asylum in France. If you know one thing about Van Gogh, it's probably that he struggled with his mental health. He cut off part of his left ear the year before he made this painting, and he killed himself the year after.

[Glenn Lowry]

There's something about the turbulence of the way the paint is applied in concentric circles and swooping lines. There's something about the way that cypress tree vibrates or the warm glow of the moon. It is an image you. You can't stop thinking about.

[Zachary Crockett]

Van Gogh died penniless. Today his paintings sell at auction for an average price of $25 million, and in one instance, more than $100 million. But one work that has never come up at auction is the Starry Night.

[Glenn Lowry]

There is no equivalent. There are other van Goghs that have sold, but they're not the Van Gogh that has brought millions of people a year to the Museum of Modern Art.

[Zachary Crockett]

So what is the Starry Night worth? How do you put a price on something that's literally invaluable, a unique object that will never be sold?

[Glenn Lowry]

There's just no way to figure that out, in my opinion.

[Zachary Crockett]

Well, we're still going to try. For the Freakonomics radio network. This is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, the Starry Night. Vincent Van Gogh only worked as an artist for about a decade, from 1880 to 1890. During that time, he created nearly 900 paintings and over 1100 works on paper. But he didn't sell many of them.

[Glenn Lowry]

Van Gogh had a troubled life. He's a kind of classic, tragic story. He had no success in the commercial market and was little known in the critical world. His success came after his death.

[Zachary Crockett]

Van Gogh committed suicide in 1890 at the age of 37, leaving a large portion of his paintings and drawings to his brother Theo. When Theo died six months later of syphilis, his widow inherited Van Gogh's life work.

[Glenn Lowry]

His brother's wife, Jo Van Gogh banger, really dedicated herself to supporting his legacy, to ensuring that he wouldn't be forgotten. She went about selling his work because she understood that for him to be in the world, to be appreciated, it wasn't only that museums had to show his work. It said people had to own it. And by owning it, it dispersed it into a world that would take care of it.

[Zachary Crockett]

In 1900, as a part of that effort, she sold the painting that would become known as the Starry Night.

[Glenn Lowry]

She sells it to a collector in Paris, Julien Leclerc. Leclerc sells it at some point to another Parisian collector before 1905, named Claude Emile Schouffenecker.

[Zachary Crockett]

By this time, Van Gogh's work had attracted some attention from critics and the public. Many considered his later paintings to be the product of a madman. And the emotional turmoil of the Starry Night made people particularly uneasy. One critic even claimed that the painting stars looked like fried dough balls. But the notoriety only increased demand for the painting.

[Glenn Lowry]

Schofenecker ultimately sells it back to Joe. It's sold again around late 1906 to Georgette Van Stolk. She keeps it for quite a long time, probably until 1938, just on the advent of the Second World War, when she sells it through the Oldenseal Gallery to Paul Rosenberg, a very well known dealer in Paris.

[Zachary Crockett]

It isn't known how much Rosenberg paid for the Starry Night, but by that point, Van Gogh's mystique had made his work more commercially desirable across the world. In New York City, curators at the newly formed Museum of Modern Art decided that they wanted to get their hands on a Van Gogh for their public collection. When they learned that Rosenberg might be willing to part ways with the Starry Night, they jumped at the opportunity. And they had the leverage to do so, thanks to a woman named Lily P. Bliss.

[Glenn Lowry]

So Lily Bliss is like the fairy godmother to this story. She was an early child pioneer of collecting modern art. When she dies, Lily does something extraordinary. She leaves her collection to the Museum of Modern Art, over a hundred works of art. She says in her bequest that the museum may sell or exchange any work of art in her collection in order to buy more important works of art. The museum has the opportunity to buy the Starry Night, but not the capital to do it. And it realizes that it can do an exchange with the dealer for three works of art from the Bliss Collection.

[Zachary Crockett]

And what were the three paintings that were exchanged for the Starry Night?

[Glenn Lowry]

So we were able to exchange Cezanne's portrait of Victor Choquet along with his still life bottle of liquor and a Toulouse Lautrec portrait of May Belfort. We exchanged three works of art that allowed us to acquire this single iconic painting.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Starry Night has been at MoMA ever since, and today it's one of the museum's biggest attractions.

[Glenn Lowry]

We get about 3 million visitors a year, and I'm going to guess that pretty much the vast majority of them will have seen the painting. So over any 10 year cycle, roughly 30 million people will have seen it on site.

[Zachary Crockett]

This is maybe not the best comparison, but we did an episode on roller coasters a while back, and you know, a theme park might spend $20 million building a new roller coaster, but you charge a ticket to get in the door. So it's hard to measure the return on investment from a roller coaster. In a similar sense, could you attribute a certain portion of visitor traffic to a single painting, or is that too hard to parse out?

[Glenn Lowry]

It's a really good question, and I've never thought about it that way. You could probably attribute a certain amount of traffic to a handful of paintings in the collection, because I wouldn't put Starry Night alone in that. There's the Demoiselle d'. Avignon. There's Matisse's Dance. There's Jackson Pollock's 1:31. The question is, is that the only reason they come? And there I'm not so sure. But there's no doubt in my mind that a significant percentage of our visitors are attracted to the Museum of Modern Art because they know that they will see Starry Night here.

[Zachary Crockett]

The painting's fame makes it a valuable asset. But just how valuable are we talking?

[Glenn Lowry]

If you tried to value it today, there's no way you could put a number on it that would make any sense.

[Zachary Crockett]

Okay, well, just to entertain the question, one approach would be to look at the value of the paintings it was traded for 84 years ago. Today, those three paintings live in museum collections in Ohio and Japan. There's no public sales record for them, but the average sale price for a cezanne painting is $13 million, while the average Toulouse Lautrec painting goes for 1 million. So maybe the Starry Night is worth two Cezannes and a Toulouse Lautrec, which would put it at 27 million. It's not quite that simple.

[Glenn Lowry]

If in 1941 those paintings equaled in value Starry Night today, in the aggregate, they would equal a small fraction of the value of Starry Night. Starry Night has emerged as this iconic Starry Night painting that sits almost outside the norm of Van Gogh's work. Whereas the Portrait of Sho and the Still Life by Ceson are beautiful paintings, but by no means the defining works of Ceson, in retrospect, this was a.

[Zachary Crockett]

Good trade for the museum.

[Glenn Lowry]

I would say this was a brilliant trade.

[Zachary Crockett]

So maybe it would be more accurate to compare the Starry Night to a painting of similar renown. In an insurance estimate in 1962, the Louvre Museum in Paris valued the Mona Lisa at $100 million, which would be a little more than a billion dollars today. Are there any similar clues in MoMA's insurance policy?

[Glenn Lowry]

What we have is a blanket insurance policy that covers our entire collection because, one, it would be prohibitively expensive to try and insure every single painting. And two, we move paintings around a lot, so their risk factor changes whether they're on view or not on view, whether they're in storage, whether they're in transit, whether at another museum. Insurance is as much an art as science, because it's really about calculating risk. What is the risk that a work of art might be damaged? The actuaries who work on this develop very complicated and elaborate models to try and if you wish, price it.

[Zachary Crockett]

While it may be hard to put an exact valuation on a painting like the Starry Night, it's safe to say that it's well over $100 million and housing something of that value is incredibly resource intensive.

[Glenn Lowry]

The restorers are working on a priceless work of art, touching it and daubing it and cleaning it, and I'm thinking, oh my God, one slip and there goes the masterwork that's coming up.

[Zachary Crockett]

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[Glenn Lowry]

Stop by the bar after have a few cold ones.

[Zachary Crockett]

I don't drink at all until 4 o'.

[Glenn Lowry]

Clock. We limit ourselves to one bottle of wine a night. Excessive drinking has a way of sneaking up on us. A few drinks a few nights a.

[Zachary Crockett]

Week, it can add up and suddenly.

[Glenn Lowry]

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[Glenn Lowry]

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[Glenn Lowry]

Value for us is primarily historical value. Is this a work of art that is important in the story of an artist's career? Is it important in the story of modern art? Does it have value to living artists?

[Zachary Crockett]

Even so, caring for a painting like the Starry Night comes with very real costs, starting with security.

[Glenn Lowry]

That gallery in which it sits has a higher than normal level of security officers making sure that the work is safe and secure and that people aren't overcrowding it so that the largest number of people possible can have a chance to see it.

[Zachary Crockett]

In recent years, protesters have thrown paint or food on works of art to demand action on climate change. Three of Van Gogh's paintings at museums in Europe have been targets.

[Glenn Lowry]

Those attacks by climate activists primarily have made us increase our security. And that increased and enhanced security begins before you even walk in the door. It puts all of us on pins and needles and also creates levels of protection that further remove the immediacy of the object. We have to ensure that either an inadvertent accident or a willful act will not damage this work of art.

[Zachary Crockett]

The first line of defense for the Starry Night is its frame.

[Glenn Lowry]

The frame is really a box with multiple layers in it in order to protect the painting against vibration, so that humidity doesn't build up between the painting and the glass. It's sealed so that no dirt and dust could get inside the box. It is secured by a complex set of devices, so you couldn't just pick it up off the wall. The frame has been carefully designed so it emulates what we believe Van Gogh might have wanted as a frame around the painting. And there's a master craftsman in our museum on staff who makes these frames.

[Zachary Crockett]

Art consultant Gavi Wolf, who runs the firm Indie Walls, estimates that a frame like the one used for the Starry Night could cost between $5,000 and $8,000. And Glenn Lowry says that the museum's protective measures go go beyond the frame.

[Glenn Lowry]

So when you enter our galleries, it's not unlike an operating theater in a hospital. The climate is controlled to an incredible degree. We try and maintain temperature around 72, 73 degrees, and we try to maintain relative humidity between 45 and 55%. And there is a vast machinery that is working 24, 7 to ensure that the climate remains stable and inside those tolerances. So when it becomes suddenly warm outside, or when the temperature plummets, or when the humidity rises because of a giant rainstorm. The systems in the museum automatically engage to balance out those changes in air so that the temperature and the humidity remain stable. And we have these incredibly complicated filtration systems that take out the most microscopic particles of dust and dirt from the air, so that when you're in the museum, you're breathing really clean air at a very stable condition.

[Zachary Crockett]

All of this has protected the Starry Night from decay, but it still gets assessed regularly by the museum's conservationists.

[Glenn Lowry]

Van Gogh was actually a very talented craftsman. He understood the chemistry of paint. His paintings, by and large, have held up extremely well. But that said, we are constantly inspecting the painting on the wall in the galleries. Occasionally it is removed from the wall, goes up to our conservation lab where we do microscopic examinations of it to make sure that we don't see any kind of deterioration. The painting has been extensively documented with high res images that allow you to see microscopic daubs of paint or even little tiny cracks in the paint, cracks that are the normal condition of aging.

[Zachary Crockett]

MoMA gets a lot of requests to loan out the Starry Night to exhibitions around the world. They usually say no because of the risk that the painting could get damaged in transit. When Lowery approved a rare loan to the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago, even the three mile journey uptown was a huge ordeal.

[Glenn Lowry]

I mean, it's a military exercise. Security specialists planning every single moment of the transition from the moment the picture came off the wall to how it was packed into a secure crate, how that crate was transferred into a secure vehicle, what the root of that vehicle was, where and how it was received at the Met, how it got on the wall at the Met. All of that was planned to literally the second.

[Zachary Crockett]

All right, so you don't throw it in the back of a Volvo.

[Glenn Lowry]

I'm pretty certain that even the President of the United States doesn't travel with the level of security that we had when we moved this.

[Zachary Crockett]

If you're not in New York, you won't get to see the Starry Night in person, but reproductions of it are readily available. You can download a photo of the painting and make it your desktop background, or buy a print and hang it on your wall, or even build a version out of Lego. For the most part. MoMA doesn't make any money from these reproductions.

[Glenn Lowry]

We own the painting. We do not own the copyright. The copyright was originally owned by the family. But now, because the painting is as old as it is it's in the public domain, which means that if you wanted to, I don't know, make a soccer ball with Starry Night on it, it could be done. So Lego, for instance, could have done it, I suppose, entirely on their own, but they chose to come and work with the museum because they knew that we have the high resolution images.

[Zachary Crockett]

So just to make sure I have this right, moma has a copyright on a photograph of the painting that can be licensed out if you want a.

[Glenn Lowry]

High res image that has to be licensed from the Museum of Modern Art. So we can control what, what we produce and what we license, but we can't control you taking a picture of Starry Night or ripping a picture of Starry Night off the Internet and doing something with that.

[Zachary Crockett]

Even so, MoMA has undeniably benefited from its decision to acquire the Starry night back in 1941, and the painting has also benefited from the museum.

[Glenn Lowry]

I think a lot of credit goes, of course, to the decades of work the Museum of Modern Art has done to promote Van Gogh as a great artist, to show this painting frequently, to put it in context with other incredibly important works from the late 19th and early 20th century.

[Zachary Crockett]

But there's a certain mystique to the painting that can probably never be explained.

[Glenn Lowry]

Sometimes you can't actually predict what's going to be the defining work of an artist's career. Not all artists are of the same talent, and not all works created by an artist are of the same level. This is one of those paintings that takes something reasonably familiar, a landscape and a Starry night, and transforms it into something deeply emotional, powerful, and ultimately universal. Something that all of us can feel in our bones.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson.

[Glenn Lowry]

There are people who have come to the museum in order to get married in front of Starry Night. We don't do weddings, by the way.

[Zachary Crockett]

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[Glenn Lowry]

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[Glenn Lowry]

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[Zachary Crockett]

Sounds like Spectrum is really committed to keeping you connected.

[Glenn Lowry]

It's amazing.