Urban Art Association

With the help of the artnet Analytics team, we present the current list from the artnet Price Database, tracking four years' worth of sales data

Presented below are two two intersecting lists. The first presents the highest-selling individual lots for living artists, which contains a number of entries by Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, Peter Doig, and Christopher Wool, to name just a few. (Yayoi Kusama is the only female artist to make the cut.)



The second list shows the top 100 living artists based on the total value of secondary market sales from January 2011 through mid-October. It ranks artists by the total value of works sold and indicates the number of individual lots. The handful of female artists on this list include Kusama, Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu, Cady Noland, and Vija Celmins, among others.

This list also features a number of Chinese contemporary artists who have proved to be top earners in recent years, including Zeng Fanzhi, Cui Ruzhuo, Zhang Xiaogang, and Zhou Chunyu accounting for four, or roughly half, of the top ten.

Also notable is the ranking of Howard Terpning, a painter who is prized by Western art collectors. Terpning is known for creating realistic, highly detailed historic paintings depicting 19th-century Native American life. He ranks at number 91, with cumulative sales of over $22 million for just 83 works.

news.artnet.com/people/banksy-araki-artnet-top-300-349922

number one for internet searches, apparently better than _waxking

Right place, right time and a good PR agent.

The list itself only really tells you what rich people are willing to spend their money on and that isn't any indicator of how good the art is.  However, to pick a few names from the list what might be considered important...

1.    Gerhard Richter - Richter is kind of credited with saving the medium of painting at a time when alternatives like college and video installation were threatening to become the dominant medium.  There's a certain amount of hyperbole there but he did create a new way of painting by focusing the work on the application of the paint rather using the paint just as a means of depicting something else.

11    Damian Hirst - The YBAs were a genuinely exciting and interesting art movement and I think Hirst's success has come off the back of being seen as the groups leader, even if this wasn't actually the case.  Personally, I think the inclusion of Damian Hirst and omission of fellow YBA-artist Jenny Saville from this list is proof that sales values have little correlation with the quality of the art but that's just me.

23.    Cindy Sherman - her work anticipated the modern obsession with celebrity, fame and self-promotion and was therefore important because it was very much of its time.  Her work also helped to both push feminism forward and to cement photography's place as a contemporary art form in its own right.

29.    Anselm Kiefer - Kiefer's work addressed issues about the Second World War and helped Germans confront their country's dark history and make sense of possibly the most significant episode in the 20th century.  The show a few years ago at the White Cube's space in Bermondsey was incredible and the work really felt like it carried the weight of history.

74.     Anthony Gormley - Gormley's work is very personal and about ourselves but I think the reason he's important as an artist is that he's managed to perform the difficult task of conveying that to the public at large; the Another Place figures have almost become a part of the local community in Sefton and the Angel of the North got its own Magpies shirt.

90.    Bridget Riley - Riley was at the forefront of the Op-Art movement (even if she hates the phrase) which itself changed the way we view seemingly inanimate art.  The geometry and lines in her paintings trick your mind into thinking the work is flicking and dancing on the canvas which messes with your sense of reality.

100.    John Baldessari - Baldessari is the godfather of  conceptual art but mostly he's just a total dude...

Nice post feral, thank you. I still don't get christopher Wool though.