Take a peek under the hood, if you even care
So, how does it work, this measuring of power? It goes without saying that this is one instance in which ArtReview is waiting for a suitably accomplished AI to take over. But this list has never been about wishing, or about what might be. (At least ArtReview tries to make it so. Even if its therapist would point out that all trying is inevitably lying.) Those are merely childish dreams. Rather the list is an attempt to fix a snapshot of how the artworld really operates. Of who decides whose art gets shown, what subjects our institutions address, what type of art we get to see today, where we get to see it and what barriers to accessing it are constructed or deconstructed. The artworld, as we all know, is not the open space in which anyone can say anything, or where everyone has an equal space, regardless of who they are, what they believe and where they come from. Even if that is generally how the artworld prefers to present itself to those who live in the real world. A belief in that really would be a matter for a therapist to get to the bottom of.
But this list certainly is not a form of therapy. (Although, in the sense that it’s some kind of reality check for those so immersed in pure aesthetic contemplation that they lose track of everything else, the impurities in their contemplation included, twiddling their fingers while the world burns, perhaps it is a therapy of a sort.) Indeed, it’s often the opposite of therapy. A site of escalation rather than its inverse. Within the panel that decides who goes on or off, and who ends up where, there is inevitably intense debate, if not straightforward argument. And door slamming, fist thumping, cake smashing and toys definitively ejected from the pram. The list is shaped through a long process of input and debate, casting for opinions and insight from a global panel, and subject to no small amount of fiddling, tweaking, revision and rearranging, and then repeating it all over again. And although the result looks like a sequence of ordered facts, it’s anything but so; instead it’s the optimal synthesis of widely differing points of view. We await the day when the list will simply be a matter of what the computer says.
‘Whose points of view?’ ArtReview hears you squeal. That’s where things get complex. The ‘panel’, which now numbers more than 40 people, is made up of individuals based in different world geographies. (The panellists are all part of the ‘artworld’ in various capacities – artists, curators, critics, consumers – but panellists are not allowed to be on the list themselves – either they are off the panel or off the list. And ArtReview never reveals who they are, because its friends from the CIA told it that this was best practice, and this way they can freely pass judgement over their friends, colleagues, nonfriends and complete strangers without fear of reprisal or retribution.) Each of them gives the ‘group’ an account of who’s shaping the art people get to see from their (geographical) point of view, and then the ‘group’ whips out a series of more or less wicked chains and knives and battles it out to decide whose point of view will prevail. And in a world that’s decreasingly made up of centres and peripheries (when it comes to art, that is), the fight tends to last longer with each successive year, and gets more violent and bloody. Although, rest assured, ArtReview makes sure that no one actually gets hurt. Physically or emotionally.
‘What does “shaping the art that people get to see” actually mean?’ ArtReview hears you snarl. Well, that’s not straightforward either. Although ArtReview certainly wishes it were. It’s a combination of influencing the type of art that’s being produced, influencing the type of art that’s being shown and, for the purposes of this list, having an influence that extends beyond the local cultural ecology. Of course, however ‘pure’ the world of art thinks it is, money inevitably helps to grease the wheels that make it move (sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, sometimes little more than a wobble from side to side), just as much as do politics (both local and global) and the natural environment (or more generally the world around us). Increasingly too, in line with what ArtReview’s more hippyish friends describe as ‘the spirit of the times’, there’s an importance given to those who manage, somehow, to bridge the gap between the world of art and, well, the world. ArtReview’s Wiccan friends are really into that – crossing between worlds – right now, although ArtReview wonders if they stole that idea from Marvel Comics. Anyhow, as far as ArtReview knows, neither the hippies nor the Wiccans nor the Marvel suits had any influence on the composition of this list. Even though ArtReview generally assumes that they have a subtle influence on everything these days. Which leads us neatly to the final point: that perhaps real power is of the kind that you never see; the kind that you never know is influencing you in the first place. At least that’s what ArtReview’s priestly friends keep telling it.
Explore the 2024 Power 100 list in full
