Bryan Faller

Bryan Faller (Master of Philosophy in Liberal Arts ’24) works at the intersection of art and finance. “I’m a fiduciary, and my formal training is as an art historian. I’m in a unique space because I’m able to speak to both the money aspect of art and the art historical aspect of art,” he explains. His responsibilities include managing money for individuals, families, and organizations, and helping those entities build and curate art collections. He also works as an art dealer, teaches the business of art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and conducts research. After publishing his first researched book about art and estates, a co-edited volume of essays titled Creative Legacies, Bryan began to think about his project. He had an idea that was seeded in research he began as a graduate student in 2009, but was unsure how to proceed. Penn’s Master of Philosophy in Liberal Arts (MPhil) helped him work out the research questions and methods that would best serve his project goals. “I loved the fact that in the MPhil I could expand upon the work I'd already done,” says Bryan.

To balance his coursework with his demanding career, Bryan took a slow and steady approach to completing his coursework. “It's super easy to accommodate a busy schedule with the course load and the scheduling, if you just pace yourself and you don't mind taking your time to finish it,” he says. “But I also think you enjoy it more when you're just doing one class at a time, because you can fully immerse yourself—you can really take your time and marinate in it.” The flexibility of the program also meant he could determine where and when to complete his courses—including virtual courses, which allowed him to participate in class even while traveling. Since the MPhil is an interdisciplinary degree, explored a range of subject areas: he took a course in organizational theory that aligned with his previous studies in business school, and a course about artificial intelligence that gave him quantitative and qualitative perspectives that helped him think about information and data in a new light. “What I do is so interdisciplinary already,” he explains. “I’m managing money, and I’m managing art, and I’m dealing with people from vastly different industries most of the time. Communicating effectively with different demographics is really helpful.”

With a book project in mind, Bryan naturally gravitated toward writing workshops—but they led him to insights and practices he did not expect. One of the first writing courses he took was titled Writing Experiments. “It was like nothing I’d ever done before,” he recalls. “It made me a little bit uncomfortable, which meant I really wanted to run in that direction and dive into it. And that was the best decision, because it was such a great course for me to be exposed to different examples of weird and unusual literature that I never would have had the opportunity to read in any other context. It was amazing to marinate in that for an entire semester, and it was one of my favorite classes.” Another writing workshop that influenced him was titled Creative Research. “It was basically a research methods class, about how to dive in and think about a project,” says Bryan. “That was amazing, because it forced me to articulate what questions I’m asking. What am I doing? How am I going to do it?” The professors for these two workshops ultimately became Bryan’s thesis advisors.

This out-of-the-box thinking suited Bryan’s subject matter, which frequently challenged traditional methods and mythologies. When he began the research in graduate school, he recalls, “I was recording the oral histories of different artists and art dealers. I'm very much interested in their opinions and their insight on the various markets.” What he took away from these interviews were insights into how these artists lived, who they were painting for, and how their work was distributed. “These previously unrecorded histories help you understand what actually shaped the creative decisions they were making at any given time,” explains Bryan. “That’s where a lot of the creative writing classes helped me to tease out how to approach such interdisciplinary information and piece a narrative together in a cohesive way.”

For his MPhil thesis, Bryan continued to conduct interviews but began to bring in expert perspectives from fields adjacent to art and finance. He interviewed the head of the economics department at Yale, the chair of the philosophy department at Penn, and an art dealer for a significant blue chip gallery. Despite his own professional affiliations, Bryan credits the MPhil program with opening the doors to those conversations. “When you come in from a research perspective—and doing it at such a well-respected institution—I think people get excited about that. “They're like, that’s interesting, let's have this conversation.” As he conducted his interviews, Bryan found a strong basis for his project’s argument in the ways the conversations overlapped. “These are three experts who have nothing to do with one another—they have vast, vast differences in how they look at information and artists and artwork—and they were essentially telling me the same thing. They were describing different sides of the same cube.”

And that argument, at its center, is about the intersection of art and finance—a junction that Bryan is uniquely positioned to examine. “Essentially, the questions I am asking are concerning the politics of taste and taste making,” he says. “The most fundamental question is, why does the art historical canon exist? Who decides what is art and what is good, and who decides what remains and what does not remain? And when you boil it down, it's the people that are supporting the artist: the collectors and dealers and curators who have a stake in the game. So there's an economic incentive.” The implication of this research, says Bryan, punctures the mythology of artistic genius; there are many more factors that influence artistic legacy. “Name any artist—Calder, Warhol, Francis Bacon—and I’ll explain to you how their market was made and who was backing them,” says Bryan. “You have to have talent, of course, but you also have to be aligned with people with power and money to make sure that your market is created and then supported in perpetuity.”

The thesis Bryan ultimately submitted was a hybrid project that allowed him to explore different styles of writing, exercising the storytelling skills developed by his challenging workshops and capturing the larger-than-life stories told by his early interview subjects. “There was a short story component, because the story of me doing the research is often more interesting than the research itself,” he laughs. “I gave a case study and fleshed out how these conversations came about. Then I go into more academic discussions and insight, teasing out the ideas that we’re discussing.” The thesis also formed the underpinnings of the book Bryan set out to write. The book is now at the proposal stage; there has been interest from fifteen different publishers. “I haven't even written the book yet!” says Bryan. Once he signs a contract with a publisher, he’ll continue researching and writing the rest. “I’m getting a lot of great feedback, which is always helpful and encouraging. And from there I’ll start going around the world and interviewing people in Paris and Tokyo to flesh out all these different ideas and people.”

“I had a fantastic experience," he concludes. "The way the MPhil is designed is really helpful for people who want to pursue an intellectual project…. And it's so incredibly flexible. There are no constraints.”