How much footfall does the average commercial gallery have for each show, do you think? A few hundred people? It’s never going to be 1,250,000 people. And it’s for that monthly-page-view figure that Forrest Nash, the twenty-five-year-old founder of the Contemporary Art Daily blog, appears on this list. At least once a day, Nash, who started the site in 2008 while still a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, posts a series of images from an exhibition, chosen from a brimming inbox of pitches. 

But Nash’s influence isn’t just that he can exponentially expand a show’s audience; a recent Artforum essay by Michael Sanchez made the persuasive argument that a certain strain of white-light-lit midlevel galleries are catering their shows directly to the blog, and that certain ‘memes’ can be traced in art practices that, though geographically diverse, have all been covered by the website.