Creative innovation in golf course architecture and retrospective judgments of quality

Abstract

In creative fields, supply is often thought to precede demand, rather than reacting to it, the source of Richard Caves’ influential “nobody knows” property, which is especially strong at points of significant stylistic change. Producers compete to promote new work, often through polemics that demarcate new styles from predominant ones by assigning new meanings to historical styles that are held to possess important meanings that are revived in the new style. This retrospective revaluation of past styles, “reputational entrepreneurship”, is meant to influence preferences of consumers (and thus demand), the efficacity of which may be measurable in some cases; for example, golf course architecture, where periodic magazine rankings of golf courses exist. We empirically evaluate the efficacity of a polemic advanced in the early 1990s by young architects (entrepreneurs in the reputational and professional senses) seeking to advance the reputation of pre-war relative to post-war architecture. We measure changes in consensus judgments through changes in biannual magazine rankings of the 100 Greatest Courses in the United States, and find that the rankings evolved in favor of pre-war as opposed to post-war (1945–1985) courses. We situate our analysis with reference to developments in the golf industry, discursive consecration of specific ideals as to the character of golf itself, and the propagation of the latter via appeals to social distinction. We relate our results to a Bourdieusian model of interdependence of demand and supply in creative fields undergoing major change, as well as to the literature on related questions in the field of conventional architecture, especially the triumph of Postmodernism.