最も偉大な芸術家6人は誰？

Vanity Fair [US] December 2013 (単号) (2013/11/15) 不明 商品詳細を見る

芸術家を取り上げたことで12月号のVanity FairでWho are the six greatest living artists?とアーティストや研究者、キュレーター100名にアンケートをとり、6人の芸術家を選んでいました。

Paint by Numbers
Who are the six greatest living artists? This provocative, perhaps unanswerable question is worth asking for what it reveals about a cultural arena in which money and fame often seem to be the paramount obsessions. Surveying the results from V.F.’s poll of top artists, academics, and curators, Mark Stevens creates a portrait of the art world today and identifies the values that really preoccupy its best and brightest.
By Mark Stevens

“I do not believe in ranking artists. Art is for life.”という反応は編集部も織り込み済み、アンケートも54名からしか返事がなかったそうです。詳しい結果はこの下に紹介している別のリンク先をご覧ください。

A different group of voters, of course, might have picked different artists. (The voter pool selected by the Vanity Fair editors tended toward the older, American, and mainstream.) Of the roughly 100 asked to vote, more than half (54) did so. That’s more than I would have expected. It’s natural not to want to “judge” artists; Mark di Suvero responded by explaining, “I do not believe in ranking artists. Art is for life.” It’s also natural to arch an eyebrow at the low pop appeal of lists. (Jasper Johns offered an elegant demurral, writing “Regrets” on the editor’s invitation to participate in the poll.) But compiling lists can also be a useful parlor game, forcing one to make difficult distinctions and clarify murky values. I admired those with the courage to make a call. Besides, they risked making six friends now—and a thousand enemies forever.

この著者は6人に共通する特徴として「I（私）」を見出しています。

What portrait emerges? There is no single look to the art or common countenance to the sensibility of the artists who top the list, each of whom can be viewed in a variety of ways. But there is a powerful shared preoccupation with, to put it as nakedly as possible, “I.” In a period whose presiding spiritual disease is narcissism, the artists we most admire play, seriously, with what we can know about who we think we are. Me, myself, and I—the modern trinity—has rarely seemed less fixed or certain.

ほかにも女性芸術家が思った以上に少なかったことや、Paintingやphotographyを専門にする芸術家がほとんど選ばれていないことなど、アンケート結果の総括をしています。

以下がアンケート調査の詳細です。リンク先では誰にアンケートを取ったかも記載しています。

NOVEMBER 1, 2013
The Full List of Participants and Nominees in Our Greatest-Living-Artist Survey
by Mickey Stanley

The Most-Voted-for Artists

Gerhard Richter: 24 votes
Jasper Johns: 20 votes
Richard Serra: 19 votes
Bruce Nauman: 17 votes
Cindy Sherman: 12 votes
Ellsworth Kelly: 10 votes

Other Artists Nominated

Artists Who Received Five Votes
David Hammons, Brice Marden, Ed Ruscha, James Turrell, Kara Walker

Artists Who Received Four Votes
John Baldessari, William Kentridge, Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei