Better off dead? Prices realised for Australian paintings sold at auction

Using auction sales data on Australian paintings over the period 1995 and 2003 we investigate the relationship between artists‟ living status and the price of paintings sold at auction. For deceased artists we consider the time since their death and for living artists their conditional life expectancy. Hedonic regression analysis is applied separately to the data on Indigenous and non-Indigenous paintings. Comparing the modelling results across Indigenous and non-Indigenous paintings we see evidence of two different patterns of response to an artist‟s living status. Both yield non-linear impacts but for Indigenous paintings these are quadratic and for non-Indigenous they are quartic. Thus the response to living status in the more recent market for Indigenous paintings is different to the more established market for non-Indigenous paintings. Whilst the responses differ for the two types of paintings, in answer to the question posed and in terms of the price of a painting at auction an artist is better off long dead or close to death.