The dynamics of artistic prestige

Artistic careers and artistic prestige are dynamically linked: artists and art institutions derive their prestige from their past successes (trajectories), and their present prestige influences the further course of their careers. In addition, the prestige of artists and institutions are intertwined. Artists derive their prestige at least in part from their affiliations to art organizations, and the prestige of organizations is based on the artists which they are able to take on. This paper introduces a simple but efficient index to measure dynamic prestige from a longitudinal network of affiliations. It is shown that the prestige of literary magazines can be computed from the flow of authors between magazines and that it correlates strongly with external indicators of literary prestige. An advanced method for analyzing longitudinal networks was used to demonstrate that this index of prestige predicts the exchange of authors between magazines whereas static indices of prestige do not. The results corroborate the relational and dynamic character of positions within the literary field postulated in the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu.