WHAT REALLY MADE MONET’S ART GO VIRAL?

Is Claude Monet a truly great painter or just the beneficiary of good early publicity? To hear Derek Thompson tell it, he was a highly skilled early Impressionist. But there was something else subtly at work that created his enduring popularity.

Monet was one of a handful of Impressionist painters whose work was given to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris as part of a young man’s bequest in the late 1800s. As a result, his paintings, along with other Impressionist art, were shown in the first national exhibition of such work, and that broad publicity, Thompson argues, was what made those artists popular. It shaped what people thought Impressionism was, and Monet rode the wave to fame.

As Thompson argues in his book “Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction,” Monet succeeded not because he was the best artist but because repeated exposure persuaded people to like his work.

In our age, the principles of popularity still apply. Books such as “Fifty Shades of Grey” land on the best-seller list. Movies such as the Star Wars franchise gross billions of dollars. And social movements such as the recent Women’s March on Washington bring communities together around a common goal or interest. But though it’s clear that some things grab collective attention, why these things in particular? That question lies at the heart of Thompson’s book. Mixing anecdotes and science, he explains the psychological principle of mere exposure, or the fact that the more you see something, the more you like it.

Thompson is a gifted writer and has a knack for finding intriguing stories. But rather than dwelling on any one in particular, or taking the time to fully unpack it, he often flits to the next sexy example. This quickly gets overwhelming. It makes it hard to remember what the main point is or how it relates to the overall theme.

In a chapter on “The Viral Myth,” Thompson argues that nothing goes viral. Though this is a fun idea, it’s not exactly correct. Thompson reviews research on social media that suggests few things spread from person to person online. Rather, traditional media, especially broadcast, is responsible for causing broad exposure. If something spreads virally through social media, it typically doesn’t go from one person to the next, like a virus, but rather is propelled by a few people who have big followings, and it takes off from there.

Thompson is partially right. When people use the word “viral,” what they often mean is that something is popular: a video got 10 million views or a post got hundreds of thousands of likes. But that doesn’t mean the content was actually contagious. Advertisements might get 1 million views because they were shown during the Super Bowl or because companies paid to feature them on various websites, but that doesn’t mean people shared them.

What Thompson glosses over is that some things do get highly shared. And if you understand why people share, you can engineer things to be more contagious. Emotional news articles are more likely to make the most emailed list, and people are more likely to talk about certain things, or brands, if reminded to think of them by the surrounding environment.

Even before broadcast media, people were sharing stories, news and information. We’ve all seen juicy gossip dash around a schoolyard or through an office. But Thompson provides few insights into how this builds and spreads. This kind of person-to-person sharing gets short shrift in his book.

Thompson also argues the virtues of “optimal newness,” which occurs through a blend of familiarity and novelty. On the familiar side, hit songs tend to have a certain structure, Barack Obama’s speeches repeat the same refrains, and ESPN shows the same clips again and again. Familiarity can be good, but too much of it can be boring. So if you add a pinch of newness, you’ve got a familiar surprise — something that seems new but is similar enough to things we’ve seen or heard before to evoke familiarity’s warm glow.

That notion captures “Hit Makers” perfectly. Thompson takes wellworn research and tries to give it new life through novel stories.

It doesn’t make for the most revelatory book, but that’s not a bad thing. Thompson, after all, seems to take his own advice. As he notes: “The difference between a brilliant new idea with bad marketing and a mediocre idea with excellent marketing can be the difference between bankruptcy and success. To sell something familiar, make it surprising.”

Jonah Berger is a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote this review for the Washington Post.