Valuing visuals: Assessing visual elements impacting hammer prices

This paper explores the impact of visual elements on the hammer prices of figurative paintings at auctions. Prior research has analyzed auction dynamics, contextual, cultural and financial factors but did not explore the influence of specific visual features as such. There is a general understanding of the different visual factors within art connoisseurship that is acquired while analyzing art inherently. Consequently, there are no systemic definitions describing and identifying the visual elements. This paper aims to create a measured research approach based on formal art aesthetical analysis and visual content analysis to look into the presence of formal elements in figurative paintings impacting the value assigned by bidders. Following the creation of a codebook and the analysis of 500 paintings, it was found that diagonals positively impacted hammer price. While the findings were limited, the paper is beneficial by offering a replicable framework for analyzing visual features in paintings or other visual representations. This framework can provide a foundation for interdisciplinary studies and automated art analysis. The applications can also extend to digital contexts, such as the analysis of social media images, linking visual features to online engagement metrics like likes and comments.