Every year and now for the twenty-second time, the same name tops the list of one hundred “greatest contemporary artists”, the 55th edition of which has just been published by the business magazine “Capital”: Gerhard Richter. The following ranking also stopped the “Art Compass”, which was founded by the journalist Willi Bongard in 1970 and for which his widow, the journalist Linde Rohr-Bongard, has been responsible since 1985.
After the ninety-three-year-old German painter, the American conceptual artist Bruce Nauman, born in 1941, ranks second; In third place was 87-year-old Georg Baselitz from Germany with his reverse figure, followed by Rosemarie Trockel as the highest-rated woman, also from Germany. At 73, he is the youngest of the top five, now joined for the first time by the seventy-six year old American sculptor, Tony Cragg.
Different criteria, slightly different order
Tracked by a complex points system and entirely subjectively weighted for exhibitions in important museums, purchases by them, and mentions in specialist publications, this is the art world as seen from Cologne. On the British online platform “Artmag”, after evaluating market data, institutional recognition and “cultural impact” – i.e. popularity – things may look a little different, with Jeff Koons leading the way ahead of Yayoi Kusama, Damien Hirst and Banksy in the first ranking of the “100 Most Influential Living Artists Today”.
But there is still no way around Richter, whose works are among the most expensive on the art market and who has just been awarded a brilliant retrospective by the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris for his work spanning seven decades, although he only finished fourth. Berlin art magazine “Monopol”, on the other hand, went all out and on Monday named Richter the most important artist and number one on its “Top 100” list of the most influential figures in the art world, which takes into account curators, gallerists and collectors and is constantly reordered according to current trends. Richter “suddenly once again became the best artist of our time,” said the editorial team.
In the arts network
This is not surprising – see above – because the year-end popular list of the most important, most expensive and most influential basically corresponds to what data analyst Albert-László Barabási revealed in 2018 with his visualization of art networks: contacts with the most prestigious museums and dealers around the world, with “gatekeepers” such as MoMA, Center Pompidou, Gagosian or Christie’s, and from a certain point a feedback effect emerges. Listing by importance is part of this system. Next up is Art Review’s Power 100.
