Two words that are not the same

Two writers, one name

In the spring of 1978, short sentences began to appear on the walls of lower Manhattan, always signed with the same four letters: SAMO©. They read like a bored philosopher’s advertisements. One offered SAMO “as an alternative to God.” Another recommended it as an end to “mindwash religion, nowhere politics, and bogus philosophy.” In December of that year the Village Voice ran a piece asking who was behind them, under the headline “SAMO© Graffiti: BOOSH-WAH or CIA?” The answer was two teenagers, whom the reporter identified only as Jean, 17, and Al, 19. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz had met in 1976 at an alternative high school, and the name began, Basquiat said, as a private joke between friends. Diaz later recalled that they took turns coming up with the sayings.

By early 1980 the campaign was over. Basquiat, by his own account, wrote SAMO IS DEAD across the neighborhood (Diaz says another friend did the writing by then), and went on to paint. In 1980 his paintings were shown at the Times Square Show. In 1981 he had his first solo exhibition, in Modena, Italy. In 1982 came a solo show at Larry Gagosian’s gallery in Los Angeles and a place at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, where, according to his dealer’s chronology, he was the youngest of 176 artists. That October his dealer took him to Andy Warhol’s studio, and the two became friends. He died in New York in August 1988, at 27, of an accidental heroin overdose. In May 2017 a painting he made at 21 sold at auction for $110.5 million, then the highest price ever paid at auction for the work of an American artist.

Al Diaz kept working too. He is a year and a half older, had been writing on subway cars since he was a boy, and today makes art in Brooklyn, much of it from old subway signs. He is far less widely known. The two men started with the same walls, the same sentences, and, for the SAMO years, the same signature. Why did the world answer them so differently?

The question is the engine of this course. It is also easy to answer badly. We can explain it with one man’s genius (but SAMO was a joint work), or with luck, or with charm and connections, and each story sounds convincing once you already know how it ended. A better start is to ask what we mean by the question. When we say two people have had very different careers, are we talking about what they did, or about what the world did with it? The source lectures of this course say these are two different quantities, and that much of the science of success is the study of the distance between them.

Two words

The lectures use two words with precise meanings. Performance is about you: your actions and what they produce, such as the time you run, the matches you win, the lines of code you write, the papers you publish. Success is about us: how a community notices, acknowledges, and rewards that performance, in attention, prizes, citations, sales, followers, and income. A performance measure depends only on what the individual did. A success measure depends on how other people reacted.

The distinction sounds small, and it is easy to blur in daily speech, because we say “a successful runner” for someone who wins and also for someone who is on a cereal box. In a tennis player’s season you can see both kinds of measure at once. His wins, his losses, the points he collects, and his ranking are performance. How often people search for him, how many look at his page on an online encyclopedia, and how much sponsors pay him are success. They usually move together, and the question is how closely.

When performance can be measured: a tennis study

If success were simply performance seen from the outside, the two would always rise and fall together. Often they do not, and in most careers it is hard to say why, because we cannot measure performance cleanly. How good is a novel, a start-up, or a scientific paper, independent of whether anyone notices it? Sport is the exception. A tennis match has a score, a tournament has a bracket, and a ranking is computed from the results. So in 2016 two researchers, Burcu Yucesoy and a colleague, used men’s professional tennis to ask a precise question: can you predict how much attention a player gets from what he does on court alone?

They collected the full record of the men’s professional tour from the official site: every match, opponent, tournament, and ranking. For the other side they used the hourly number of visits to each player’s page on the online encyclopedia, from December 2007 to January 2015, for 499 players. This is attention measured as exactly as attention can be measured. Page views rise in bursts during the tournaments, with the largest peaks for the finals of the biggest events. They then looked for the on-court quantities that move the peaks, and found five:

• the player’s rank, which is itself computed from his results over the previous year;
• the value of the tournament, measured in the points it awards the winner;
• the number of matches he plays in the tournament, since every round he survives is another day on screen;
• the rank of the best opponent he faces, since a match against a better player draws attention;
• the number of years he has been a professional.

Each of these alone says little, but they multiply: a high-ranked player, deep in a big tournament, against a better rival, draws much more than any one of the factors would suggest. The authors combined them in a single formula with only two constants, fitted on 2008–2009 and then used, unchanged and the same for every player, to predict the next five years. The predictions followed the real page views with a correlation of 0.77, which means that the formula accounts for about 60 percent of the variation in how many people looked at a player’s page. It also worked for players after they retired, for several years.

This is the second of the ten rules in the lectures (the first is the distinction itself): where performance can be measured, it drives success. A tennis player’s attention is, to a large degree, predicted by his results. That is also what schools and employers hope is true everywhere: work hard, perform well, and the world will notice. In a sport with a scoreboard, to a good first approximation, it does.

Notice how much the claim carries and how much it does not. The study covers men’s tennis only, not women’s tennis (the source lectures say otherwise), and no other sport. It explains about 60 percent of the variation, not all of it: the authors list young players who were far more popular than their ranking implied, and a famous case, Anna Kournikova, whom they cite as a player whose fame outran her singles results. (She was also ranked number one in the world in doubles and won two Grand Slam doubles titles, so her case is weaker evidence than it looks.) Page views are also a proxy for fame. The counts of those years come from an early system that did not separate human readers from automated programs, a definition the Wikimedia Foundation changed in 2015. None of this overturns the finding. It does mean that “performance determines success” should read “performance largely predicts attention, in a sport that has a scoreboard.”

When it cannot be measured: the art world

Now take away the scoreboard. In the spring of 1917 a porcelain urinal, signed “R. Mutt” and titled Fountain, was sent to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The society had no jury and no prizes: anyone who paid the entry fee could show. The work is attributed to Marcel Duchamp, who sat on the society’s board and entered it under a false name. It was kept out of sight for the whole show, and he resigned from the board. (He said later that it had not been rejected, but “suppressed.”) The original is lost, and only a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz survives. In 1964 a dealer in Milan had a set of eight replicas made. One was sold at Sotheby’s in 1999 for $1,762,500, and in 2004 a poll of 500 art-world professionals, commissioned by the sponsor of a British art prize, ranked Fountain the most influential modern artwork.

Here is a case with no performance measure. The object was made in a factory. A plumber and a museum would judge it by entirely different standards, and nothing about the porcelain tells you which is right. It was not even the first “readymade,” as Duchamp called an ordinary object chosen as art; his bicycle wheel of 1913 came first. Its value depends on a story: who submitted it, what the exhibition was, who wrote about it afterward, and what other artists did because of it. (No museum can hang the original, because it is lost. Museums hold replicas; New York’s Museum of Modern Art has other readymades but, by its own collection data, not a Fountain.) In the language of the lectures, performance is unmeasurable here, and success is all context.

Return to the two writers. The lectures read their stories this way: Diaz as the one who cared about the work and kept the secret, Basquiat as a natural networker. What the record shows is less tidy but not far from it. The 1978 article used first names only. In 1979, by most accounts, Basquiat let it be known that he was SAMO, and Diaz has said that this annoyed him, because SAMO was turning into Basquiat’s alone. Basquiat then moved quickly through the places that confer reputation: a group show at a downtown space in 1980; a New York dealer, Annina Nosei, in 1981; a Swiss dealer, Bruno Bischofberger, who took him to Warhol in October 1982; Gagosian in Los Angeles. He was also a friend of the artist Keith Haring from 1979, and moved among artists who were building one another’s reputations. Each introduction made the next one easier.

That is a story, and one career is not data. For most readers it has an obvious survivor’s bias: we are told about the graffiti writer who made it, and not about the thousands who did not. But it poses a question that can be tested with numbers, and in Lesson 4 we will test it, on a database of about half a million artists. First, we need to see why even in sport, where performance is clear, success has a shape that performance does not.