Looking back at the introduction to the original Power 100 in 2002, ArtReview editors annotate the justifications of their predecessors
The art/power AXIS constantly changes. [Shorthand for saying that the list needs to be published every year. Though it’s not instantly obvious what is meant by ‘the art/power axis’: whether or not it means the relationship of art to actual (in the world) power, or the axis of how power operates within the artworld. Keeping it open allows for the possibility of the former (optimism) and the reality of the latter (pragmatism), thus pleasing everyone. Which, when you’re about to issue a list like this – one that no one is going to agree on – is no mean feat.] Artists, patrons, dealers, directors, curators and collectors are always JOCKEYING for position [By deploying a horse-racing metaphor, the editor subtly suggests that there is in fact a competition for top spot on a list that until then did not exist. So no one knew that there was an official, judged top spot to be had. At the same time she displays her art-historical acumen, given that horses are traditionally associated with displays of power. One immediately thinks of Jacques-Louis David’s 1801 portrait of a triumphant Napoleon crossing the Alps, conquering a beast and the natural elements in the process. A true triumph of man. Or, perhaps a little less helpfully, but certainly much more of the moment, of Maurizio Cattelan’s series of dangling taxidermied horses, suspended impotently from the ceiling (Novecento, 1997, or The Ballad of Trotsky, 1996). It got worse of course, when the Italian artist began siting the horses so that their heads disappeared into the walls, such that they functioned as trophies of the rear end rather than the head. That’s not what the editor was trying to conjure here though. At the time she wrote this, that was yet to come. She probably wanted us to think of Napoleon. At his moment of triumph; not his downfall], just as art movements shift and markets fluctuate. [These days we’d probably suggest that the movements change rather than shift, though the editor here is obviously trying to conjure the image of a digestive process as work as a canny metaphor for the process of constructing the Power list. Subtle, but effective.] It’s not entirely a question of wallet power [This is an era before digital transactions, Apple Pay and touch cards were ubiquitous, when people had to carry their cash with them in order to spend it]; IDEA POWER can also shake the artworld to its core. [Here the editor alludes to the popular idea of the time that the global artworld was divided into a core and peripheries. And that some bits of it were shaken more violently and more frequently than others. Today we like to think that the core is utterly dispersed and utterly everywhere, although the Power list from this year would suggest that this is still as much of a delusion as is thinking that there was ever a core in the first place.] Some choose to wield their power publicly, others very PRIVATELY. [The last involved being part of a specialist ‘club’ or a world before the MeToo movement.]
This special supplement sponsored by leading art insurers AXA Art [Whatever happened to them…], the first of an annual series [That early promise of constant change finds its apotheosis!], freezes the international contemporary art scene at a KEY MOMENT in its evolution, albeit viewed through London-tinted lenses. Even our own panel of passionate and informed experts, including Godfrey Barker, Louisa Buck, David D’Arcy and Ossian Ward, found it virtually IMPOSSIBLE to agree on who should be where – or whether or not they should be on the list at all. [Still the case with today’s panel! Although they find it actually rather than virtually impossible. Even if they are meeting on Zoom.] Only one thing is certain; next year it all will have CHANGED. [It has in fact never ‘all changed’; for many years in fact it is the same power players shuffling position or not even that. Proof perhaps that it is in the nature of power to not behave as you wish it to. Or that the artworld is not the fast- paced environment that everyone makes it out to be. Or desires it to be. There’s little room for desire on the list today btw.] So the big question is, where are YOU? [ArtReview had a very small but very powerful readership in those days.] Flip the pages and find out. [What she said!]
Meredith Etherington-Smith, 2002 [& ArtReview, 2024]
Explore the current Power 100 list in full
