Therapist: Are you sitting comfortably?
ArtReview: No. Normally it’s ArtReview that gets to ask the questions. It doesn’t really like things this way round.
T: Tough. I think we really need to talk about some issues surrounding your list. This Power 100 business – ranking and measuring – it’s really all about an art magazine investing itself with a power it doesn’t actually have. There aren’t even any art critics on your list, for goodness’ sake!
AR: There are very few art critics who can claim to have the kind of global influence that most of the people on ArtReview’s list display. Language, geographic practicalities and the economics of being a writer take care of that. But to go back to the main question, in this case ArtReview is an observer, not an enforcer. For this one issue, it keeps its own ideas to itself. As much as it possibly can. And there’s very little power in that.
T: You know that last bit’s not true.
AR: ArtReview can’t control other people’s perceptions of what it does. Maybe the list is only an instrument of power in and of itself because other people think it is. If ArtReview is powerful in all this, it’s only because it takes this listmaking seriously and provides something in which its readers and other commentators believe.
The artworld has never been particularly good when it comes to openness and transparency
T: That’s the problem with all this art business! It always comes down to abstract things like beliefs. You can’t make a ranked list based on that.
AR: Sometimes the very pleasure of looking at an artwork can lie in its ability to let you escape the tyranny of fact that so much of the rest of our lives are lived under. You seem a bit too angry to appreciate that, however. Maybe it’s best to say that belief or the ways in which we are taught to perceive the world around us can be one of the most powerful forces when it comes to manipulating social groups or encouraging people to think in a certain way.
T: Your list is made by a secret cabal of judges. We never know their names. Why all the secrecy?
AR: ArtReview’s panel is made up of people representing almost every artworld ‘type’: artists, curators, critics and sometimes even collectors (but they normally want to be on the list, and if you’re on the panel you can’t be on the list). We keep them anonymous to protect them and so that their bosses, collaborators or coworkers don’t fire or ostracise them upon learning that they themselves have not made the list.
T: So much for openness and transparency, then.
AR: ArtReview is just being realistic. The artworld has never been particularly good when it comes to openness and transparency. That’s one of the reasons ArtReview began making this list in the first place.
T: So you make this list to reveal the hidden network of power in art, but then hide the names of your panellists? Isn’t that what most people would call a contradiction?
AR: ArtReview is not completely blind to the contradiction or irony in its last reply. It’s an entertainer, after all.
T: Isn’t your annual list simply another entertainment you provide? All those people sliding up and down, on and off an imaginary greasy pole that’s an invention of your own twisted mind?
AR: Perhaps ArtReview’s list does include evaluations that in the long term should be seen as provisional, but that’s in the nature of any attempt to assess what’s going on in the tiny space of the contemporary, the right now. As it has said elsewhere, that’s why ArtReview restates its list every year – you should read the introduction text for more on that.
T: Most of the top ten never change, though.
AR: Power doesn’t change hands that fast. That’s the reality of things. But actually if you compare this year’s list to one from ten or 15 years ago, you’ll find that the top ten has changed a lot.
T: I’ve seen all those ads at the front of your magazine – your list is just a marketing tool and then a record of people who advertise with you, isn’t it?
AR: Have you been talking to ArtReview’s publisher again? You seem to be articulating his wildest dreams. Many of the people on the list don’t advertise with ArtReview and many of the advertisers aren’t on it.
T: Those last people must hate you.
AR: They’re a bit more sophisticated than that. But there’s no denying that over the years this listing business, while wildly popular with its readers and the global media, has lost ArtReview one or two potential friends.
T: Sounds like making this list is a display of suicidal tendencies, then – everyone knows that success in the artworld lies in creating intricate networks of supporters and friends.
AR: Sounds like you’re confusing artworld success with Tate, there. There are as many ways to achieve success in art as there are to skin a cat. Some however may be more efficient or straightforward than others.
T: Your first name is Art, so why aren’t artists always top of your list? After all, as you doubtless keep hearing at all those gallery dinners you go to, art is nothing without them. It’s where the whole industry begins, no matter where it ends up.
AR: The Power 100 is about those people influencing what art gets shown and why – about why certain types of art reach a public, through exhibitions, media exposure and suchlike. Artists don’t often get to make the decisions about all that. The list is really about how an artwork navigates its way in the world around it; it’s definitely not about who’s the best artist, otherwise Bruce Nauman would be number one in ArtReview’s eyes each and every year.
T: I thought you were all about dispassion and a lack of fear or favour?
AR: Only in the Power 100 issue. Every other issue is entirely about what ArtReview and its writers do or do not favour. Sometimes it’s also about our fears for the direction of art.
T: You didn’t challenge me on the use of industry in that last-but-one question. Is art an industry in your eyes?
AR: In the sense that art is about the transformation of raw materials (whether they be material or not) into goods that can be consumed (whether economically or intellectually), perhaps that is the case. Industry and capital do go together, after all, and there’s a lot of capital in contemporary art right now. Go to an art fair and you’ll find out. But now’s not the time to get all Marxist on your ass. The power issue doesn’t really address the idea of labourers and masters in the big game of art. But in other issues of its magazine, ArtReview has plenty to say about that.
The 2016 Power 100 list will be live online here at one minute past midnight on Thursday 20 October
From the November issue of ArtReview, on sale from 20 October 2016
