He’s young, he’s British, he’s an artist, and now DamienHirst, patron saint of the Young British Artists, is announced asthe most powerful figure in the art world. Next week ArtReviewMagazine publishes its Power 100, the annual ranking of the mostinfluential contemporary artists, collectors, museum directors,curators and dealers around the globe. This eagerly awaited listhas come to define the early 21st century economics of taste thatdetermine what art we see, where and how we see it, whether we likeit and how much we pay for it. Launched in 2002 and based onfactors including auction sales, prominent exhibitions, majorpurchases by collectors and museum-style shows by galleries, itrecords who’s in or out, up or down, making a fortune or goingbust.
For the full ArtReview Power 100 list
The radical shifts in the Power 100 between this year andlast illustrate how fast the contemporary market moves. More thanhalf the artists on the list are new entrants. Bruce Nauman is thehighest newcomer at number 9. Hirst shoots from number 78 last yearto the top slot. There are four new European painters – MarleneDumas, Peter Doig, Anselm Kiefer and Chris Ofili – marking how thewheel of fashion not only rolls but comes round full circle. Morethan a third of all the artists this year are painters and thePower 100 2005 confirms the triumphant return of this mosttraditional medium to the contemporary arena.
But, as suggested by Hirst’s and Nauman’s position as theonly artists in the top 10, the largest presence here – physically,metaphorically, democratically – is installation art on a hugescale. Never before have architects entered the list so high:Herzog and de Meuron at number 11 and Renzo Piano at 35 are emblemsof a new relationship between art and its glamorous, highlydesigned, grandiose new settings, such as London’s Tate Modern andFrank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, which are often greater publicattractions than the art that fills them, and demand a particularsort of monumental work. Artists who have the brains, balls andcash backing to provide it are and will become increasinglyprominent. Many artist new entrants have made the list on accountof pieces in highly visible urban settings, where art reaches atruly democratic mass audience: the Christos, whose bright orange miles-long installation “The Gates” transformed New York’s Central Park in February at a cost to the artists of more than $20m; RachelWhiteread for “Embankment” at Turbine Hall, and Bruce Nauman for “Raw Materials”, which (un)filled the same space last year – that is, filled it only with noise.
Expect to see art get bigger and more site-specific –factors which will determine long-running geographical battles.This year, London wins over New York, Germany over France. Asia isstill nowhere. But a black artist, Ofili, makes the list for thefirst time and women fare better than ever. Thus, before our eyes,Power 100 anticipates the trends that will shape the aestheticlandscape of the 21st century.
Capital of that landscape in 2005 is London. The topartist, Hirst, is British. The top museum director, Tate’s NicholasSerota, runs the world’s most popular museum of modern art; TateModern had more than 4m visitors in 2004-5 and Serota beats GlennLowry, director of New York’s MoMA.
Last year, following MoMA’s spectacular reopening, their positions on the list were reversed.
London has stolen a march on New York in other ways too. New York gallerist Larry Gagosian, number one in 2004, number two this year, is still the most powerful dealer in the world. But he has now added to his stable of sleek shiny New York galleries a substantial and important gallery in London’s King’s Cross, which opened last year and currently has a big exhibition by a British artist, Whiteread.
The world’s number two dealer, Iwan Wirth, voted even moredramatically for London in 2005: this summer he moved his entirefamily of six from Zurich to make a new home in the Britishcapital, which he reckons has “more creative energy, the mostinteresting potential”, of any city. He will concentrate on hisambitious Lutyens-designed gallery Hauser and Wirth, in a formerbank on Piccadilly, which brings radical conceptual art on agigantic scale to the mostly conservative west end. He has risen upthe list from 11 to eight and his American partner, David Zwirner,has moved from 34 to 10: with a London-New York axis, the pairappear invulnerable.
Even the top Frenchman on the list, François Pinault,risen from number 13 last year to number three, owes his positionto the London-New York dominance of Christie’s, which he owns. Theauction house had record successes in the first half of 2005,selling £879m of art, a quarter of it postwar or contemporary. Thiswas a stark contrast with Pinault’s operations at home: he pulledout of an ambitious project to build a foundation to house hismassive contemporary art collection on the Ile de Seguin in Paris,thus squashing the entire project and relegating Paris to seconddivision in the contemporary art league. Additionally, not a singleFrench artist makes the list, and Alfred Pacquement, director ofthe Pompidou Centre, Paris’s museum of modern art, falls outsidethe top 50.
Conversely, Germany is on the rise. There are two paintersin the top quarter of Art Power 100, and both are German. GerhardRichter is the éminence grise – literally, his paintings are mostlygrey – of the European canvas, and the world’s highest-sellingartist ($10m a piece). But overtaking him for the first time onthis year’s list is 45-year-old Neo Rauch, whose very name suggeststhe start of a new smoky German art movement, and so it turns out.Rauch, born like Richter in east Germany, merges modernist andSoviet Socialist realist styles and imagery from German history;his works are sophisticated, highly referenced, colourful butgrounded in a traditional art education of drawing and paintingfrom an Iron Curtain epoch when, his dealer Gerd Lybke says wryly,Leipzig academies “didn’t realise painting was dead”. MoMA and NewYork’s Guggenheim have Rauchs; everyone else has joined a two-yearwaiting list.
Will the Leipzig school be the (sober) noughties’equivalent of the YBAs, a breath of painterly fresh air after adecade dominated by video and large-format photography? The arthistorian Erwin Panofsky once quipped that “when a Hamburger hasthe choice between paradise and a lecture about paradise, he’dchoose the lecture”, but the cerebral new German painting iscertainly attracting international collectors, from Charles Saatchito the Rubell family. At recent art fairs, including Frieze andBasel, Lybke’s gallery Eigen + Art, operating from Berlin andLeipzig, sold out of work within hours; Lybke himself has risenthis year to 38 on the list, ahead of such hip London dealers asVictoria Miro and Sadie Coles. And the new entry to Art Power 100this year of German collectors such as lawyer Harald Falckenbergand advertising executive Christian Boros – who is converting aformer Nazi bunker that even the Red Army failed to destroy into acontemporary Berlin museum – point to the increasing importance ofGermany (and its focus on history) as Berlin exploits its positionin an eastward-moving Europe. This privileges Vienna too: anothernew collector entrant this year is the Essl family, patrons of thevast contemporary Sammlung-Essl museum in Vienna and dedicated todiscovering new art from central and south-easternEurope.
The diverse figures on ArtReview’s Power 100 2005 announcethat the power of placement is everything for art today. From aNazi bunker to Herzog and de Meuron’s Tate Modern, from the BilbaoGuggenheim – where Richard Serra, rising to number 13 this year andthe world’s third most powerful artist, has installed a massivesculpture of rolled steel – to Basel’s Sammlung Paul Klee, whichRenzo Piano completed this summer, its gestural wave shapemimicking the hills of the oberland and presenting Klee in adramatic grand bouffe setting. “The hyper-expansion of the spacesfor art has decisively changed the character of the art developedto fill them,” Thomas Crows, director of the Getty ResearchInstitute, told an audience at Frieze art fair lastweekend.
The result, says Crows, is a “baroque efflorescence ofart’s apparatus of display”, as dramatised by the work of thehighest-ranking new artist entrants to the list. At number 22 isRichard Prince, whose “Second House”, an installation of 11sculptures fashioned from painted car hoods and other kitsch spreadacross a dilapidated single-storey shack and garage near theartist’s home in upstate New York, was bought in its entirety bythe Guggenheim, which had to put together a consortium ofcollectors and trustees to afford the purchase. Jeff Wall, number34, is currently showing huge light-box and fantastical tableauxphotographs in a spectacular display at Tate Modern, while amassive new installation, “Caribbean Pirates”, an obscene parody ofDisneyland by Paul McCarthy, number 37, has just opened off-sitefrom the Whitechapel Gallery at the Coppermill warehouse in eastLondon, funded by McCarthy’s dealer, Iwan Wirth.
No one understands the modern power of this sort ofbaroque display, and its inextricable link to both big business andmass culture, better than the top dog here, Damien Hirst. AtSotheby’s astonishing £11m sale of his Pharmacy restaurant art andparaphernalia last year, queues snaked round the block; the firstlot, a pair of martini glasses estimated at £50, made £4,200; and asingle medicine cabinet was £1.2m, a Hirst record. The saledemonstrated that Hirst has entered popular culture – everyonewants a piece of him – as well as the new financial clout of theglobally branded artist: Hirst’s dealers get far less than thestandard 50 per cent cut, the artist enjoyed a 0 per centcommission at Sotheby’s, and even his business manager,lilting-voiced Dubliner Frank Dunphy, is judged so significant thathe has entered the Power 100, at number 91. (Last year the listincluded Damien’s dentist, who was paid for fillings withnow-iconic pharmaceutical cabinets.)
The extent to which art is now a people business,dominated by personalities but also by art facilitators, advisors,accountants, dealers who can advise a new breed of entrepreneurialbuyer or artist, is without precedent. This explains the increasingpresence of women on the list in a traditionally male-dominatedarea: this year they make up almost a quarter of it. The number offemale artists – two – is still paltry but this is the art formwhere women, traditionally denied access to art schools, models,independent means to set up studios, have had the lowest profilethroughout history, and the triumphs of the two women on this listare indicators for the future. Painter Marlene Dumas became onlythe second women ever whose work passed the £1m barrier – the otheris 94-year-old Louise Bourgeois – when “The Teacher” fetched £1.2min May, and Rachel Whiteread is the first woman artist to take onthe daunting challenge of filling Turbine Hall, where “Embankment”looks set to become one of the most popular installations in theUnilever series, its white cube cardboard box – sugar lumpcrystalline iciness rivalling the appeal of the warm glow of OlafurEliasson’s existential setting sun in 2003’s “WeatherProject”.
Women are only just beginning to claim artistic territorylong dominated by men and the youngish female dealers, saleroomexperts and curators new to the list – such as WhitechapelGallery’s Iwona Blazwick at number 67 and Christie’s AmyCappellazzo at number 16 – will prepare the ground for youngerfemale artists, who without question will be better represented inthe future. Painters Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville and Kate Moran arelikely candidates.
Women artists such as Tracey Emin still attract an extrafrisson of media attention but it is Hirst’s top position above allthat makes clear the inextricable link between the trio of art,money and celebrity in a decade when Andy Warhol still reigns andwhen collectors such as Charles Saatchi and museum directors suchas Nicholas Serota are household names.
By contrast, the role of the critic as arbiter of taste isdiminishing: there is not one on the list and the only academic,Robert Storr, has plunged from number 9 to number 73, despite beingdirector of 2007’s Venice Biennale.
“Making money is art and working is art and good businessis the best art,” said Warhol. Art has always been good business:Hirst’s four studios, full-time staff of 50, art-book publishingcompany, new series of limited edition prints, and 300-room gothiccastle in Gloucestershire, acquired recently to house his sizeableart collection, form a one-man culture industry not so differentfrom the vast entrepreneurial workshops and showpiece private homethat made Rubens the richest and most famous artist in 17th-centuryEurope. Until the late 20th century contemporary art was always anelite, educated interest; now living artists are celebrities in amass money-driven market, a trend the very establishment of thePower 100 three years ago acknowledges. “No one – except me – sellsshit round here,” says the self-styled “sequoia among shrubs”, NewYork dealer Larry Gagosian. “Art is what you can get away with,”said Warhol – or as Shakespeare said more than three centuriesearlier, “What’s aught but as ’tis valued?”
THE TOP ARTISTS
(Overall positions in brackets)
1. Damien Hirst (1)
2. Bruce Nauman* (9)
3. Richard Serra (13)
4. Neo Rauch (20)
5. Richard Prince* (22)
6. Gerhard Richter (25)
7. Takashi Murakani (28)
8. Jeff Wall* (34)
9. Paul McCarthy* (37)
10. Ed Ruscha (39)
11. John Baldessari (42)
12. Marlene Dumas* (45)
13. Peter Doig* (52)
14. Anselm Kiefer* (54)
15. Chris Ofili* (58)
16. Jeff Koons (62)
17. William Eggleston (72)
18. The Christos* (85)
19. Rachel Whiteread* (97)
*new entrant this year
THE TOP 20 WOMEN
(Overall positions in brackets)
1. Marian Goodman (pictured), dealer/gallerist(14)
2. Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s* (16)
3. Lisa Dennison, museum director* (17)
4. Maja Oeri, collector (29)
5. Barbara Gladstone, dealer (32)
6. Amanda Sharp, Frieze art fair director (33)
7. Mera Rubell, collector (41)
8. Dominique Levy, dealer/gallerist* (44)
9. Marlene Dumas, artist* (45)
10. Sadie Coles, dealer/gallerist (48)
11. Victoria Miro, dealer/gallerist (50)
12. Ingvild Goetz, collector (57)
13. Thelma Golden, museum director (59)
14. Iwona Blazwick, museum director* (67)
15. Francesca von Hapsburg, collector (71)
16. Zaha Hadid, architect (75)
17. Alanna Heiss, museum director* (77)
18. Ann Philbin, museum director* (79)
19. Maureen Paley, dealer (81)
20. Jeanne Claude, half of Christos, artist*(85)
ArtReview’s full Power 100 list is available in the magazine’s November issue, on sale on Monday October 31 ( www.art-review.com ).
