Urban Art Association

Art's 2008 Power 100 List, by alsbabar on Oct 14, 2008 1:02:03 GMT 1, List of the top 100 powerful artists, collectors, galleries etc in the world

Science aka Damien Hirst is Number 1
Banksy is Number 63 in the list

Full list and article here:

www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/14/baartists214.xml


Who are art’s top 100 most powerful people? Mark Rappolt finds out

To most people, contemporary art is a world of anarchic — and sometimes buffoonish — freedom.
# 2008 Power 100 List in full

Today’s artists make a living out of piling up bricks, pickling fish, gluing diamonds on to skulls, “exhibiting” the mess in their bedrooms and getting people to jog around galleries for reasons that remain, at best, mysterious.

And we go to galleries to experience a reciprocal sense of freedom: to swoon before beauty, shudder before ugliness, reflect on whether or not all this stuff is telling us anything about the modern world, and perhaps wonder how these lazy jokers get away with it all. Anything goes.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. The truth is that anything doesn’t go.

The things we see in our museums and galleries are filtered, selected and presented to us through a complex network of dealers, collectors, patrons, museum directors and, occasionally, artists.

A recent American survey found that the nation was home to more artists than lawyers or doctors. We’ll never hear of or see most of them.
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So who are the people who decide which artists become famous and what art we get to see? For the past seven years ArtReview has published a list of the 100 most powerful people in the art world in an effort to make this more transparent.

And sitting on top of the 2008 rankings, released tomorrow, is shark-pickling BritArt superstar Damien Hirst.

As investment bank Lehman Brothers was going under in the middle of last month, Hirst raised £111 million at a groundbreaking (because artists traditionally sell new works though their galleries) auction of his work at Sotheby’s.

Ploughing your money into art, it seems, is safer than putting it in a bank.

All of which is why Hirst has risen above his primary dealers – gallerists Larry Gagosian from America (number 2) and White Cube’s Jay Jopling (6) – as well as Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota (4). He simply doesn’t need them any more.

Hirst is also a good example of how contemporary art reflects modern life. Like our shopping centres, our art world is dominated by superbrands: Hirst in Europe, Jeff Koons in America and the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami (whose recent American retrospective included a Louis Vuitton boutique selling Murakami-designed fashionwear).

Koons and Murakami are in 11th and 28th position on the list respectively, and reflect the increasing dominance of artists equipped with large, factory-like production studios.

The flip side of all this is a desire for something more “authentic” and less about branding, one reason why graffiti artist Banksy crashes on to the list at number 63.

While he probably didn’t imagine that the kind of thing he once daubed on walls would now sell at auction for hundreds of thousands of pounds, winning fans (and collectors) including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the market-savvy Hirst clearly did: he snapped up several Banksys some years ago.

Following in Banksy’s trail, “street art” exhibitions have become all the rage, notably at Tate Modern this summer. Where the market moves, museums often follow.

So who are the market’s movers and shakers? As in every other luxury market, the Russians are starting to dominate. This summer Roman Abramovich splurged £17.2 million on a Lucian Freud.

As a result, Abramovich (and girlfriend Dasha Zhukova, who is compiling a collection for her new contemporary art centre in Moscow) enter the list at number 54, while Ukrainian steel tycoon Victor Pinchuk, who funded the Ukrainian pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale and has been on one of this year’s biggest spending-sprees, is number 67. So what next?

Well, the answer might be Thomas Kinkade, the kitsch American artist who has crept on to the list at number 100. Before his Sotheby’s sale, Hirst claimed that his decision to bypass his dealers and sell direct via auction was an exercise in making his art available to everyone.

But while Hirst sells through swanky galleries and posh auction houses, Kinkade sells his art in shopping malls and via the QVC shopping channel.

Where Hirst has a studio, Kinkade has a network of “master-craftsmen” who produce many of the works in a range that spans from prints to paintings.

It was estimated a few years back that one in 20 American households owns one of his works.

Hirst is hot on Kinkade’s tail: he’s in the process of opening a new shop in London.