Darius Spieth Named Ogden Honors College 2024–25 Sternberg Professor

BATON ROUGE, LA – The Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College at LSU has selected Dr. Darius Spieth of the College of Art and Design as the 2024-25 Erich and Lea Sternberg Honors Professor. Established by Lea Sternberg in 1996, the professorship is the highest award conferred to faculty by the Ogden Honors College.

Dr. Spieth’s international scholarly reputation relies on his expertise in the interrelationships of art, intellectual history, and economics. He has leveraged his vast international and practical experience to publish over 50 books, book chapters, articles, prefaces, postfaces, exhibition catalogue entries, and other forms of writing. Every semester, he teaches upwards of 2,000 students, mostly in introductory, freshman-level classes. He furthermore serves as the LSU Art History Area Coordinator and is a three-time winner of LSU Reveille/The Mag’s “Best Professor on LSU Campus,” based on a popular vote by students.

Dr. Spieth’s major publications have included, for example, detailed analyses of the market for Netherlandish art during the French Revolution, and the rituals of pseudo-Egyptian secret societies in France during the reign of Napoleon and his aftermath. He is set to unveil a new, trailblazing study, spanning classical antiquity to the present day, of the synergies between art, art history, money, and rankings.

“This book project will do nothing less than decipher the macroeconomic and cultural DNA of art markets past and present. I will look at the history of assessing value and beauty by numbers across time. It also will be the first to look at the relationship between macroeconomic shocks and art markets,” Dr. Spieth said. “As you know, economic shocks affect all aspects of the economy.”

Before arriving at LSU, Dr. Spieth attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where he graduated with degrees in art history and French. From there, he alternated his educational pursuits between universities abroad and in the Midwest, first attending Sorbonne University in Paris, then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also earned an MBA degree in finance at the International University of Japan in Niigata, before finally completing his Ph.D. in art history back at Illinois.

After spending time in a curatorial position at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum and as a registrar at a prestigious commercial gallery specialized in early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde art domiciled in Germany and Switzerland, Dr. Spieth joined LSU in 2003 as an assistant professor of art history and began teaching honors courses in 2008. 

As a nexus of faculty and students from across all LSU departments, the Ogden Honors College provides scholars unique opportunities to explore every facet of their academic interests in a small classroom setting, resulting in cross-curricular exchanges of ideas to which Dr. Spieth greatly contributes. He most recently taught an honors seminar on “Art and Its Market.” Among the topical classes he offers through the Honors College, one finds “Art and the French Revolution,” “Picasso,” and “Art and Colonialism.”

“The students in the Honors College have a great diversity of interests, and they epitomize the best of all worlds,” Dr. Spieth said. “It's a Renaissance experience, the coming together of arts and sciences and the understanding of how they relate to each other.”

Sternberg professors are asked to deliver a formal academic lecture to the Honors College community, and Dr. Spieth’s lecture will be titled “Predicting Financial Markets through the Behavior of Art Buyers.”

“This is a business school-like case study of what happened in 1990, 2008, and 2020. It looks at graphs, indexes of art markets and stock markets, etc. And it looks at individual artists, their creations, and correlation patterns with financial markets,” Dr. Spieth said. The lecture is designed to be interactive, promising to put the audience in the shoes of art buyers and stock analysts to further their understanding of the interconnections between art and financial markets.

“We will also look at the issue of economic shocks in both financial markets and in art markets, and how they manifest themselves differently. We will look at behavioral finance and topics of information efficiency. The material raises the interesting question whether one can look at what's happening in art markets and then read the tea leaves of financial markets, and vice versa.” 

Dr. Spieth’s Sternberg lecture will take place Thursday, February 13, at 4:30 p.m. in the Hans and Donna Sternberg Salon of the French House.

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Image Credit: Jean-Claude Figenwald