The power of hours

It was hardly the ideal place to create a masterpiece. Vincent van GoghA Dutch artist who painted The Starry Night in 1889 while staying in a French mental asylum after suffering a breakdown. He died by suicide the following year. was not allowed to paint in his room at the asylum, so when the sight of the Morning Star from his window inspired him, he had to hurry to his studio and paint the scene from memory. Once finished, he thought the painting was a failure: while some of the elements seemed "a little good," he wroteHis letters to his brother Theo were published after his death and are considered among the most illuminating written by an artist., "the rest says nothing to me".

History has judged it otherwise. Today, The Starry Night is considered one of the greatest works of modern art - a landmark in Post-ImpressionismA late 19th-Century art movement whose members used vivid and sometimes unnatural colours, and often distorted the shapes of what they saw.   which is recognised across the world. Now five scientists working with a complex computer programme believe they have discovered why.

Writing in Nature magazine, they note that the careers of great artists are characterised by "hot streaks" - by which they mean "bursts of high-impact works clustered together in close succession". To discover how these came about, they analysed the careers of 2,128 artists, 3,477 film directors and 20,040 scientists.

They judged the artists by the auction prices of more than 800,000 works, the directors by the online ratings of 79,000 films and scientists by the number of citations their papers received over 10 years.

To chart artistic progress, they scanned paintings and used artificial intelligence to analyse features such as brush strokes. For films they used AI to analyse summaries of the plots.

Some people, they observed, like to focus on a single style or subject, while others experiment with lots of different ones. The key to a hot streak, they concluded, is a combination of the two - a period of exploration followed by one of intense focus.   

Van Gogh, for example, painted pictures very different from Starry Night before hitting the hot streak, lasting from 1888 to 1890, which produced it.

In film-making, they point to Peter Jackson, who tried comedy and horror films before making his name with The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In science, the American chemist John Fenn explored many subjects before focusing on electrospray ionisationA technique for measuring the size of large molecules..

There are undoubtedly plenty of geniuses to whom this pattern applies. Whether the scientists went about their project in a sensible way is another question.

To start with, their assessment of "high-impact" works is dubiousQuestionable. It derives from the Latin word for doubt.. The fact that something grabs attention does not necessarily mean that it is any good: it might simply be controversial. Equally, online film ratings simply reflect the taste of people who bother to give them.

Nor are auction prices a reliable measure of quality: the most expensive painting in the world, though attributed to Leonardo da VinciAn Italian artist and inventor (1452 - 1519), considered to be one of the world's greatest geniuses. He painted the Mona Lisa and designed an early flying machine., is regarded by many as a fake. And the fact that a scientific paper is widely cited does not guarantee that its conclusion is right.  

The value of analysing pictures and films with AI is also dubious, when critics can gauge the development of an artist's work just by looking at it.   

Do we all have the potential to go down in history?

Some say, yes. Everyone is born with some kind of talent, and if you focus on it and work very hard, you can make a mark on the world. One theory is that you need to practise for 10,000 hours as a child to realise your potential. Another is that being open-minded and curious about the world is the key: Leonardo da Vinci has been described as "the most relentlessly curious man in history".

Others say, of course not. Geniuses are incredibly rare - that is why we are so impressed by them. No amount of practice will enable you to paint as well as Van Gogh unless you happen to be born with similar gifts. Even if you are, reputations are largely a matter of luck: Van Gogh was almost unknown in his lifetime, and sold very few of his paintings.