Gauging spheres of influence and schools of thought is about more than momentary fads
Explore the 2024 Power 100 list in full
The Power 100 list is an annual tally of who and what made art happen during the past 12 months. It’s a structural portrait of international contemporary art, identifying and accounting for the figures and faces who have created, inspired and crafted the art we see. And sometimes it questions the extent to which contemporary art can be or is truly international in the first place.
Still, at heart (though heart has nothing to do with it, as it’s obviously just a matter of objective measurement, a ‘science’ if you like) it’s an attempt to illuminate how and why certain forms of art are being presented in one place, to imagine how they might manifest in another and to trace some of the strings being pulled to make that happen. It includes the artists and collectives who create the work, the curators, gallerists and museum directors who display the work, and the funders who stump up the cash to make and buy the work. The artists here (or anyone else here, for that matter) aren’t necessarily just the ‘most successful’ (whatever that means) or most visible or circulated; power is also about influence, and having the sway of emotion and insight, a spark that creates a ‘school’ around an artist.
But also, as art isn’t about a chain of objects changing hands (most of the time), the list includes writers, philosophers and thinkers who are helping to spur on the art and exhibitions we see around us now. Still, when someone’s dropping a bomb on you, a fascinating artwork doesn’t necessarily feel like an object of much power. And neither, by extension, do the people who create, promote or distribute that artwork. Indeed, most likely those people don’t feel relevant to anything at all. Which is all a way of saying that, in the greater scheme of things, the question of art and its relation to power in any meaningful sense is something that’s quite relative. Relative to your own investment, whether that is emotional or financial, as well as to circumstance and to the space (in every sense) that art occupies in various parts of the world at large. And to the influence that it can, or even might, exert upon that space, or more ambitiously, that world. But let’s not kid ourselves here.
‘In the world that we live in today, it is actually those without power, without any hope of power, who understand more about life,’ the art critic, novelist and sometime ArtReview contributor John Berger once said. ‘[They understand] more about this enigma of this shit of a life, sometimes, and more about its beauty,’ he concluded. His point was that in hierarchical societies (such as the ones most of us live within) those at the top are more distanced from reality, both in its terrible and beautiful aspects. But what Berger was actually trying to explain, as he said all this, was why he liked a particular artwork. Specifically, Diego Velázquez’s Aesop (c. 1638), an obviously invented portrait of the celebrated fabulist in the guise of a peasant. He liked it, Berger suggested, because stories and storytellers occupy a space near the bottom of the social hierarchy. Closer to life. Where the real stories are.
Artists too are storytellers, and now more than ever we are demanding that art tell stories that relate to life, rather than to fantasies of escape from that life. Is this going to be a list dominated by those without power, then? A sort of peasants’ uprising? No. Because part of what this list aims to do is to remove the rose-tinted spectacles that most people assume the artworld sports at all times and to tell you about who might really be pulling the strings that operate the curtain that affects what (art) we do or do not get to see. And in that sense to be some sort of snapshot of what the artworld looks like right now. Before Donald Trump ascends to the top.
So what is art’s power? It’s a question – perhaps the question – that ArtReview asks itself, not just once a year when it puts together the Power 100 list, but with every issue. Because although it doesn’t shout it out loud, the problem of what art does, can do or should do – what influence it has (and whether or not this influence is good, and how one decides what that ‘good’ is) – is one that exercises not only artists, but the whole edifice of contemporary art. The complex, interlocking system of galleries, institutions, curators, funders, thinkers and others who, collectively, define not only the idea of contemporary art, but its practical reality.
The power of that set of intersecting or conflicting interests is the subject of the Power 100 list, but if ArtReview has learned anything in its 75-year existence, it’s that art exists in a context where greater powers hold sway, and which often dictates the limits and possibilities of what artists and the artworld can do. This has been a year of stark contrasts when it comes to the context in which art wields its influence. The year may have been marked by the latest edition of the Venice Biennale, that still-powerful institution whose curator this year sought to celebrate a decentring of power (perhaps paradoxically) away from the old centres of the artworld, to celebrate the marginal and the marginalised, while recentring the story of art on the rest of the world. But outside the artworld, 2024 was the year of rightwing electoral successes and rising anti-immigration sentiment across Europe; of Israel’s war in Gaza and confrontation with Iran and its proxies, and Russia’s war against Ukraine; the election of Donald Trump; and behind it all, the grinding realignment of geopolitical power from the West to the East.
All of which shouldn’t have too much to do with power and influence in the artworld (because art, as we all know from traditional aesthetics, exists in its own special zone of exception), but eventually does, and reveals both the limits of the artworld’s power, as well as the points where that power intersects with those beyond it. After all, boycotts and cancellations have created deep rifts in sections of the Western artworld while battles over free expression have erupted in places ranging from Myanmar to Hong Kong and Bangladesh. Meanwhile, as the world economy struggles with the consequences of the energy crisis, the commercial art market sooner or later feels the effects. And as the dynamism of the market falters, the influence of funders and curators – staging art on bigger platforms than any commercial gallery could – come to the fore. In an age where culture has become a political battlefield, artists and thinkers with strong opinions and critical nous bring that weight to bear on an artworld trying to figure out where it stands on the issues of the day. All of these shifts, ArtReview notices, weave through this year’s Power 100 list.
Explore the 2024 Power 100 list in full
