SourcesWhat would happen in art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties?1
I was looking at some telephony related art projects, online, such as:
Tanalum Memorial - Graham Harwood
Mystic Truth (Calling Bruce) - Barbara Visser - 2007
Broodthaers' phone number taken over by Jan Mot gallery - Mario Garcia Torres
Emily Jacir - Inbox (2004-2005) (has to do with e-mails, not phone, but was still relevant)
one of Moholy Nagy's 1921 Telephone Paintings, dictated by phone using graphing paper, and executed in a factory
And a film called dust by Bard alum Eric Saks, which there are no images of online. And I was looking for this project I might have seen in Mute Magazine, can’t remember, where all the world’s telephone books were put into a room in London, creating a monumental, but explicitly incomplete and futile taxonomical record of everyone in the world’s phone numbers. I couldn’t locate the piece, but I did come across this nice quote on dense critical language from the very Derrida inspired Avital Ronell:
From
Q: Are you concerned that your style might make you difficult to understand?
A: … understanding as such — thinking one has understood — is a disaster. It places closural moves on a problem. Right now I’m not on the side of understanding in that simple sense of “Yes, I understand,” and that’s it. To make things “perfectly clear” is reactionary, stupifying. The real is not perfectly clear.
- Avital Ronell being interviewed in Mondo 2000, #4
Why didn’t I go to NYU again?
One of the problematic conditions of art in the age of digital reproduction and nearly immediate access, is the loss of potency in the singular object, image, or gesture. The web’s innumerable blogs, databases, and online magazines, facilitate rapid browsing with such effectiveness that researching art can become a masturbatory and sportive warpath towards comprehensive knowledge. I use the word masturbatory both because browsing feels good — it offers a temporary sense of accomplishment, of erudition, and the pleasure of seeing lots of good art, whatever that means to you — and also because it is quixotic, in that omniscience when it comes to anything is impossible given the human lifespan. The trope is that Diderot was supposedly the last man to know everything. And, as Stephen Hawking would tell us, things got so wildly complex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that complete knowledge became unattainable. Here is a passage from A Brief History of Time:
In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialist. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task of philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant.”1
As an aside, Sam Wagstaff, mentor, benefactor, and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, famously described his collecting as a game of ‘Idiot’s Delight’ (a term notable as the name of the only film in which Clark Gable sings, as well as an alternate name for the game of Solitaire, a game known for its low chance of winning). Moreover, it is not just the web medium that challenges the specialness of the lone artwork, but the sheer volume of works that exist, each vying for slivers of our attention. Traditional images and objects — paintings, photographs, and sculpture — are particularly challenged because of the volume of non-art images we see daily that are, sometimes, arguably, endowed with as much content as anything called art. So, what are we missing out on, practically or existentially, by giving a painting eight seconds of our time in thumbnail, ninety-six dot per inch format, rather than thirty minutes of our time in solitude in a gallery, or over the course of a lifetime above our imaginary fireplace mantel?
For me, browsing through images (and texts) with great rapidity is defensible because I feel like I’m getting somewhere with my grasp on art, so that I can … I don’t know … change things? Change what? I guess I mean that there’s a dilemma that spans artmaking, criticism, and curating, which is: when do you know enough to do it most effectively? When should you stop researching precedents, and get to work? What if you curate a critical, thematic, intragenerational art show, not knowing that there are serious flaws in your selections because you missed out on one chapter or another in art history?
And most criticism I read seems banal, not because it isn’t supremely intelligent or insightful or true, but because the stakes are low. Maybe we need to see a militarization of the critic: You don’t like this work? Destroy it. But in order for that to be justifiable, there must be a dominant, presumably correct, methodology that the critic is advocating and protecting, and we don’t have that.
I’ve gone off track here, but the inspiration behind this post is a passage from a review in Paper Monument, of Song Dong’s recent show at MoMA, featuring hundreds of household items horded by the artist’s mother over several decades in (pre-Great Leap Forward) Communist China.
…in the installation, the same fundamental alchemy persists: In poverty, the object is so difficult to obtain that it acquires a value far above and beyond its utility; as utility diminishes, the object retains a powerful but undefined meaning. The term “sentimental value” does not seem adequate here. Even the Chinese phrase shebude-literally, unable to let go-suggests holding onto a possession that is personally valuable because of its association with a loved one. But the things Zhao held onto, and invested with a peculiar brand of value, were bits of twine, plastic food trays, empty tubes of toothpaste, and the like: objects universally agreed upon by an industrial, mass-market culture to be garbage and unlikely to retain the emotional imprint of any of her loved ones. More saddening is that, in many cases, Zhao’s possessions moved directly from acquisition to storage, bypassing the station of utility entirely.2
Maybe we need less art, maybe even a poverty or a simulated poverty, for the alchemy to return. Someone explain if I have this all wrong.
One last comment regarding a parallel I sometimes see, between browing art, and playing videogames: 1up.com, a popular videogame website, once posed to its audience the question, “Why do you play videogames?” And of the thousands of anonymous answers, the one that seemed most profound to me was, “Because its easier than real life.”
Went to Sotheby’s today as part of a performance piece I think I’m doing, and because they had macaroni and cheese soup at the cafe. Saw the Important Russian Art show. Observations and pictures to come.
SourcesRecently, we posted a short history of artist-executed iconoclasm, that is, iconoclasm where the vandalistic act was done by either an artist in ostensible dialogue with the original author, or at least by an artworld insider (a la Tony Shafrazi). Well, here we have a bizarre new case to add to the genre, if you will. Title This is the sometimes clever and hilarious, sometimes acerbic and discomforting, art gameshow by Mark Kostabi, in which art critics and other art professional types appear as a ‘celebrity panel’ and take shots at naming Kostabi’s latest paintings, which are always overflowing with symbolism and consequently really fun to try and name. Kostabi awards cash prizes (usually $20) for the best names, voted on by himself and the studio audience. In the latest episode, featuring Glenn O’Brien, David Coggins, and Carlo McCormick, Kostabi improvises an in-studio auctioning of one of his paintings, which O’Brien joked that he’d pay $20 for. Kostabi plays auctioneer for a minute, and though he’s having a good time, there’s something sinister in his delivery. Midway through, he produces a carpenter’s blade, and, when the painting fails to garner a $300 bid, he slices it six ways to Sunday, and puts it over his head, appealing to the audience that failing to get $300 for a painting could ruin his market. Enjoy.
link to video
“Cave Paintings” at Gresham’s Ghost, curated by Bob Nickas, doesn’t know it, but it does abstract painting a disservice. Why? Its premise involves a direct reference to “the origins of picture-making, visual story-telling, and the beginning of painting.” This is actually a concept selfportrait would like to reinforce, because it uses anthropological tools and context in order to examine abstract painting as the enduring medium it is, for better or worse. In this way, it inadvertantly sacrifices its own quality by presenting abstract works that are less interesting than both the physical space (the sub-basement of 511 W 25th street) and the shows analytic concept … this is a strategy that is utilized in curating of the highest caliber. As Duchamp imparted to Walter Hopps: “never let the work get in the way.” More recently, regarding Manifesta 6, Mai Abu ElDahab wrote, “in order to succeed, this project must fail by the existing standards of the exhibition industry.”1 The problem is that, with the exception of a couple of paintings, for instance, Jules de Balincourt’s and Richard Aldrige’s, the work seems like a non sequitur to the program. Jules de Balincourt often manages to defy painterly stagnation and fogeyish gamesmanship with political, but not ham-fistedly so, figurative works such as Ambitious New Plans and People Who Play and the People Who Pay, and here he ekes out some relevance in a semi-abstract painting of a pink cavernous space, something like the belly of a giant sea creature in Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (which is definitely an artwork). Richard Aldrich at least invokes the imagery of cave painting. So, to a lesser degree, does Chris Vassell. Other works don’t answer to the very broad and provocative premise asking, I think, regarding what abstract picture-making using paint can be observed as enduring throughout the history of civilization, and in which ways the meta-narratives been most successfully been manipulated by the artists who still see the medium as worthwhile. I don’t think this is what Bob Nickas intended. The child mannequin, conceived by Richard Hoeck and John Miller, which is relocated through the space daily, innovatively (and kind of creepily, which is a flaw, the kid should’ve looked more awestruck and less like something out of I am Legend) prompts us to reflect on nomadism and its relation to the beginning of painting, as well as on a refreshed, childlike gaze given to us by the anthropological methodology set forth here.
Even James Kalm, former “Kitsch Artist”, prolific essayist, and now YouTube critic among other things, asks rhetorically at the end of his video pod on the show: “is painting alive or dead? I don’t know.” the video:
Note that “Cave Paintings” as it is currently hung is installment one of what will be a two-part show. Here is the pr:
Gresham’s Ghost is pleased to announce its third exhibition, “Cave Painting,” organized by Bob Nickas, which brings together works by forty artists who are engaged with picture-making manifested within a painting practice. This show follows another with the same title that was presented in Berlin at PSM Gallery in June 2009 that evolved as a result of Nickas’s research for his book, Painting Abstraction, to be published in October by Phaidon Press. The project was initiated with months of studio visits in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Berlin. Most of the artists in the exhibition are also included in the book, which aims to open up a wider sense of how abstract painting can be understood today. The title, “Cave Painting,” is a direct reference to the origins of picture-making, visual story-telling, and the beginning of painting. Expressionistic works are seen alongside those that are formally reserved; hand-painted pictures are shown in counterpoint to those that have their basis in mechanical procedures; the range of works accounts for both predetermined result and pure chance. Over the course of the show, a collaborative work by Richard Hoeck and John Miller, a child mannequin, will move each day to a different position in the gallery to “look at” and further animate the paintings — a strange, nomadic figurative element within the space.
The other day I referenced an article from frieze magazine by Dominic Eichler, in which he insightfully lists many of the things art is frequently (often impassionately, sometimes en ivresse) argued to be good for… what it can uniquely do, whether intrinsically or by virtue of its lofty context or imagined reputation. Here is an extended quotation of that list:
“art is the only place left that still allows a relatively autonomous, wild and profound discussion on just about anything that matters to anyone and everyone; art is just as pointless, useless and necessary as any other activity in the world; while there has arguably never been a truly adequate depiction of art in film or on television, no good film or television programme could have been conceived without lessons learnt from art; whether justified or not, contemporary art has symbolic power in Western culture, and this power gives art context, responsibility and agency; art can transform images, things and situations into more than they would be if art didn’t exist; art is the sibling of language, and sometimes they have good fights; art embraces the absurd, irrational and irreverent; art people often abandon conservative notions of family; art has a wayward conscience in an unconscionable world; there are gender issues and all kinds of racial and sexual discrimination in art, but at least they are being discussed as problems; art is preferable to religion because it’s not about finding a ‘one size fits all’ resolution; some experiences of art can be better than the best love affairs; history shows that art is what remains; art is an alternative value system; art is in everything people do, so someone needs to address that; there are hierarchies within art, but they are volcanically volatile – bursts of energy can come from nowhere and change the landscape overnight; the idea of art is nimble enough to defy definition; art loves problems, misfits, hermits and the reckless; art challenges death and despair; art may be full of contradictions, but at its core lies the idea of championing freedom.”
Dominic Eichler, Value Added, Frieze Mag, Issue 126, Oct 2009
I agree with most of those sentiments. And so its alarming, and indicative of a widespread frustration and perturbation among art people, to see an article in the same issue by Fritz Haeg, in which he half-provocatively laments that contemporary artists are irrelevant, largely due to an willful hermeticism, to the degree that the Bush/Cheney administration virtually ignored them. Fritz-man is worried that the previously ossified borders between art and non-art (and not just in the established sense of pop appropriation) have become porous faster than people have updated their practices and their willingness to accept art’s transfigured teleology, which is to say that it’s good for a different set of things than it used to be good for. But more than practice, it’s the staleness of the controlled designation art, if I have Haeg right, that’s hindering art’s potential to expand as a field.
Fritz Haeg is an architect, but as he states in an interview with archinect, he cares little about the designation ‘architect’, or about singular monumental projects, and more about what someone with architectural training can go out and do in the world. So boss man Fritz does things like … go on Martha Stewart to talk about his Edible Estates project (2008-), in which he convinces families to tear up their consumptive lawns, a staple of “suburban toxicity”, and replace them with edible gardens. The idea in placing these gardens on front lawns rather than in the concealed rear is obvious… to pique curiosity, and hopefully to elicit reflection (on average, 1/3 of the American household’s annual water consumption is attributable to lawn care).
For sure, Haeg is one of many thousands of artists and art groups with practices focused on environmental issues. But one of the reasons Haeg’s gestures are successful is that they aren’t tied to what is often a perfunctory, seemingly cliche association with ‘the arts’ as a kind of imagined, single-minded, antiquarian community that similar projects possess. To the world at large, I think the art association can be a turn-off. Take the Waterpod, which was harbored in downtown New York’s East River earlier this fall, and was part of the annual Conflux festival. It was the systematic embrace of the artist-in-residence template that bothered me about this project, a template I believe is often possessed of a hermetic elitism, even when the expression is explicitly communal. Cross-pollination among fields is great, in fact it’s the point of this post, but somehow the environmental research aims of a project like Waterpod seem more spurious when we get this part about ‘artists come aboard and … build cool stuff … out of other, recycled stuff’.
Waterpod (photo from NYTimes by Michael Nagle)
Enough with my haranguing. I’m reminded of one more, recent article from n+1 regarding the dilemma of obscurity faced by poetry in the mid twentieth century. The article quotes poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who, in the 1950s, spoke on an academic panel entitled “The Obscurity of the Modern Poet”, and said:
I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don’t read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn’t understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. … Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure—i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected—they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true; some of the time the reverse is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry.
Christopher Beha, The Calculating Critic, via n+1
obligatory Rural Studio photo of Mason's Bend Community Center -- window made of reused windshields
Obligatory photo of Elsy Lahner and Alexandra Grausam OF THE DAY, curator chicks at das weisse haus im Viennaaaaaa. Oh yeahh.
Yeni Mao - The Bust (photo via NYARTS website)
Yeni Mao was in last month’s selfportrait.net organized show, Mapping The Body.
Yeni Mao was recently interviewed for NYARTS Magazine.
Yeni Mao is contributing a big installation to SYSTEM:SYSTEM, an ambitious group show opening this Friday at 21 Monitor Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Here, then, is the press release for that show, minus the handsome graphic design of Random Number’s website:
system:system
A failing economy has decided the recent fate of 21 Monitor Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Formerly a nun’s convent, the grand three-story house now stands uninhabited due to the declining membership of St. Cecilia parish and its sister school. Rather than let the building fall into disrepair the parish has found ways to breathe new life into it through a rotating schedule of film shoots, screenings, dance performances, and art exhibitions.
Taking its cue from the friends-of-friends network that has allowed access to 21 Monitor Street, system:system is a three-day event that reflects on the nature of associations between parts of a whole. The title is a play on the term “complex systems,” which are characterized by their connections and tendencies toward unpredictable behavior. The organizing of this event evokes these qualities and embraces the small world phenomenon of strangers being linked through minimal degrees of separation to form a dynamic structure.
The unoccupied nun’s living quarters will now showcase work that experiments with the building up and/or breaking down of systems: mathematical, scientific, social, economic, and otherwise. Much like the social and economic factors responsible for this event, the behavior between the separate elements—artistic interventions and performances—will result in an atmosphere of emergent interconnectedness. The act of creating artistic content in a temporary context will feature prominently, remaining true to the fluid way in which these works were executed.
Curated by Adam Henry and Christina Vassallo
Abby Manock, Adam Henry, Anya Kielar, Arthur Ou, Chris Dorland, Curver Thoroddsen, David Brooks, Derick Melander, [dNASAb], Emily Mae Smith, eTeam, Ethan Breckenridge, Francesca DiMattio, Gandalf Gavan, Garth Weiser, Ian Davis, Inna Babaeva, Jeff Konigsberg, Johannes VanDerBeek, Kai Vierstra, Lisha Bai, Maria João Salema & Lee Wells, Marius Watz, Matthew Monteith, Matthew Schenning, Melissa Brown, Meridith Pingree, Mike Hein, MiYoung Sohn, Nika Sarabi, Peter Kirn, Phil Vanderhyden, Saira McLaren, Skyler Brickley, SOFTlab, Studio Mode, Suzanne Song, Tom Brauer, Yeni Mao
This show also has Lee Wells in it, who is da man.
Get thee to a nunnery!
In other news:
A major study has just been published documenting 21 years of studying adaptive changes in E. Coli bacteria. In E. Coli time that’s 400,000 generations. I’m thinking somewhat loosely right at this moment, about generations — as they occur for bacteria, humans, and on a geologic, and finally a cosmic timescale — and it is reminding me of a few artworks:
Adrian Piper - Everything #10 (2007)
Ben Fry - On The Origin of Species: The Preservation Of Favoured Traces (2009) (Click to launch)
Liz Glynn - 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project (2009) (Liz Glynn, please fix your website or join selfportrait so I can study your good art)
Alexandra Mir - First Woman on the Moon (1999)
Antti Laitinen - Stones
Chris Ho - Lesbian Mountains in Love (2008)
Christian Philip Muller - Passe Immediate (2006)
Gordon Terry - A Refusal of the Materialist Insistence on Surface and Plane
Valery Grancher - It Has Been
Lara Favaretto
Updated @ 2:38 EST
The BBC reports today that the Maldividan government held the world’s first ever underwater cabinet meeting. The meeting, between President Mohamed Nasheen and 11 ministers, was held 4 meters underwater, and was conceived as a lighthearted publicity stunt to publicise climate change (Maldives will, it is a certainty, be one of the most affected nations and displaced populations worldwide as the tides rise). My question: was this an inadvertent (by which I mean unintentional but also un-advertized) act of conceptual art? In the same vain as Jose Bove dumping a lorry full of potatoes at the entrance of, and then demolishing, an under-construction McDonald’s in Millau, France, in 1999, the Maldivian government has used a strategy of irrationality — gone out of their way — thereby creating a conceptual and literal image (politicians holding a meeting in scuba gear) that much concept-centric art shares. I can imagine an politico-environmentally concerned artist [like a Pierre Huyghe or a Francis Alys] staging a similar situation. Couldn’t you?
Take The Tell, a 1989 hybrid artwork/environmental statement photo-collage spanning 636 feet of Laguna Beach coastline, orchestated by photographers Mark Chamberlain and Jerry Burchfield. The project, comprised of more than 100,000 photographs contributed by citizens depicting human relationships with land, protested the proposed development of a housing-tract on…
You know what I mean? And the project worked, and the company sold the land back to Laguna Beach, but this was done by hippie activists in commemoration of Woodstock’s 25th anniversary, and not the President of a country. Why is the production of such an image intellectually privileged because it’s created intentionally by artists, and given short-shrift as a minor novelty when it’s done by non-artists?
The Tell, 1989
The overlap highlights what many have seen for some time as willfully arbitrary and entrenchedly classist deliniations between art and non-art. When the concept of high-art was collectively coined, Maybe the problem isn’t an urgent one; the stakes of contemporary art, as everyone from Francesco Bonami to Jeff Koons assures us, are low. And perhaps the collapse of these boundaries would lead to a potentially disastrous outcome for the ecosystem of contemporary art, which even pessimistic critics admit is worth preserving.
Does anybody know what I’m talking about? A little guidance, please.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8311955.stm
Also, here’s a great article from Frieze by Dominic Eichler discussing the existential doubt of being art people, and asking whether a reasonalbe argument can be mounted to justify why we keep doing what we do, despite the existential issues.
Usually, Dennis Dutton, man of letters, author of The Art Instinct, is right. He was right, if unforgiving, when he dissed Judith Butler’s prose for having written this very long sentence:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. – Judith Butler, diacritics, 1998
She rejoined with this New York Times piece, in which she basically says, ‘I’m convoluted because … because … well, Adorno and Marcuse were.’ Then she explains what the word ‘hegemony’ means.
In that Dutton has extensively studied and written on the subject of evolutionary biology, his long-period perspectives on the arts are probably right too. However, in this morning’s New York Times op-ed piece Has Conceptual Art Jumped The Shark Tank?, he demonstrates what I worried about all through The Art Instinct: though he seems to understand the last two million years of art — since we left the canopy and developed into hominoids — quite well (ie. did you know that the most commonly produced image in art on the planet, across societies, is a sort of Hudson Valley-esque landscape with green trees and blue sky, vestigial of our ancestors’ conception of a temperate paradise?!), his understanding of post-Duchamp art is deficient. It leads him to the distorted conclusion — and investment advice for speculators — that all conceptual art (lower case “c”) is about either the readymade or the explicitly assistant-produced object with ‘an idea’ behind it, and that it all fits into the Duchamp-Manzoni-Kosuth-Prince-Koons-Hirst-Murakami trajectory [like, has he even heard of the Netherlands?]. These are two tropes, or strategies, within the bagillion practice(s) one could call conceptual art.
Conceptual art has ventured in so many other directions that the designation itself, unless we are talking about the Conceptual (uppercase) art of the 60s and 70s [Fluxus, Dick Higgins, some Yves Klein, some Robert Rauschenberg, Sarah Charlesworth], is as much as catchall as ‘modern’. But the main problem with Dutton’s argument is that the Sotheby’s friendly examples he gives are not even at odds with his adamant claim that humans inherently value virtuosic craftwork and skill. True, artists like Koons and Hirst (both of whom I actually admire but consistently ignore because I know about much, much more advanced art; think Martijn Hendriks, Gianni Motti, Mircea Cantor, Alexandra Mir) forgo traditional ideas of authorship so that they can produce large numbers of objects that require lots of labor, but Dutton’s claim that their marketability will naturally decline mainly because people want the personal touch is questionable, and probably colored by his personal sensibilities. He ends the article waxing on about the craftsmanship that goes into shaping a diamond. He sounds like my dad, thinking nothing important has happened in art in the last 50 years. Concept-centric art, viewed broadly, doesn’t mean art that denies aesthetics, or the artist’s intimacy with the work … that’s just wrong … rather, aesthetics are understood in much contemporary art not merely as visual, but also social, ethical, and action-oriented. Furthermore, I think of conceptual art as a default brought on by the deteriorated status of the single object or image in society. When you see a thousand images or more a day in advertising, each colored and laid out with incredible accuracy by behind-the-scenes designers and illustrators, “art images” do begin to seem arbitrarily prized.
My arguments aren’t refined by any means, I’m just talking it out, but what I am pretty sure of is that, judging by this review by Dutton of John Carey’s book What Good Are The Arts? (2006), his ideas about art are still quite grounded in traditional philosophies of aesthetics, a la Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Kant, that art is most of all good for aesthetic pleasure and the appearance of “unity in difference”, and these are not philosophers best equipped to articulate the turns art has taken in the past half-century or so.
Like, Earth to Meekus, THIS is contemporary conceptual art - Christian Philipp Muller - Passe Immediate (2007) @ plug.in, Basel
We usually don’t re-blog, but here it is, re-blogged from mirror.co.uk, ArtReview’s top 100 art people of 2009. Naturally, it’s value is comedic above all (there are some semi-inventive entries), but it will definitely give ArtReview a healthy traffic spike.
via Mirror:
The list is compiled by ArtReview staff, in consultation with a global network of contributing editors and an international panel.
The eighth annual ranking of the most powerful players in the contemporary art world – the ArtReview Power 100 – is published in ArtReview’s November issue and a website – www.artreview100.com – is also featuring those listed.
Here is the ArtReview Power 100:
1. Hans Ulrich Obrist
2. Glenn D Lowry
3. Sir Nicholas Serota
4. Daniel Birnbaum
5. Larry Gagosian
6. Francois Pinault
7. Eli Broad
8. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood
9. Iwona Blazwick
10. Bruce Nauman
11. Iwan Wirth
12. David Zwirner
13. Jeff Koons
14. Jay Jopling
15. Marian Goodman
16. Agnes Gund
17. Takashi Murakami
18. Alfred Pacquement
19. Fischli & Weiss
20. Mike Kelley
21. Barbara Gladstone
22. Steven A. Cohen
23. Dominique Levy & Robert Mnuchin
24. Adam D. Weinberg
25. Marc Glimcher
26. Brett Gorvy & Amy Cappellazzo
27. Tobias Meyer & Cheyenne Westphal
28. Ann Philbin
29. Matthew Higgs
30. Matthew Marks
31. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
32. Gavin Brown
33. Ralph Rugoff
34. Liam Gillick 
35. Anne Pasternak
36. Dakis Joannou
37. John Baldessari
38. Isa Genzken
39. Paul McCarthy
40. Michael Govan
41. Eugenio Lopez
42. Cindy Sherman
43. Ai Weiwei
44. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
45. Annette Schonholzer & Marc Spiegler
46. Diedrich Diederichsen
47. Richard Prince
48. Damien Hirst
49. Bernard Arnault
50. Massimiliano Gioni
51. Amanda Sharp & Matthew Slotover
52. Joel Wachs
53. Victor Pinchuk
54. Udo Kittelmann
55. Marina Abramovic
56. Michael Ringier
57. Gerhard Richter
58. Richard Serra
59. RoseLee Goldberg
60. Kasper Konig
61. Roberta Smith
62. Monika Spruth & Philomene Magers
63. Germano Celant
64. Emmanuel Perrotin
65. Peter Schjeldahl
66. Beatrix Ruf
67. Okwui Enwezor
68. Nicolas Bourriaud
69. Karen & Christian Boros
70. Isabelle Graw
71. Maurizio Cattelan
72. Charles Saatchi
73. Jerry Saltz
74. Jasper Johns
75. Louise Bourgeois
76. Thaddaeus Ropac
77. Mera & Don Rubell
78. Thelma Golden
79. Sarah Morris
80. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
81. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz
82. Paul Schimmel
83. Jose, Alberto & David Mugrabi
84. Sadie Coles
85. Daniel Buchholz
86. Victoria Miro
87. Maureen Paley
88. Johann Konig
89. Nicolai Wallner
90. Maria Lind
91. Massimo De Carlo
92. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo
93. Rirkrit Tiravanija
94. Toby Webster
95. Long March Space
96. Nicholas Logsdail
97. Harry Blain & Graham Southern
98. Claire Hsu
99. Peter Nagy
100. Glenn Beck
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