I linked this post on my Facebook page and various people offered their input.

Wolfgang Stiller:

is wondering why so many people here get so excited with the "power list" that is exactly why art becomes so shallow. F.... the power list and care about art itself

Steven Kaplan:

Don't shoot the messenger. Those who create the Power List, year after year, obviously find it of some importance. My reporting it as news does not make me complicit in its assumptions nor in the self aggrandizement of its compilers.

Oliver Wasow:

I suppose you're right Steven, but if you just ignore it, it will perhaps go away.

Steven Kaplan:

On the other hand, you might choose to acknowledge it but then allow others to deride it for its silliness, pomposity and false claims at defining a zeitgeist.

Wolfgang Stiller:

true and unfortunately this definition of Zeitgeist is what we all have to deal with - weather we like it or not

Grace Graupe Pillard:

Glenn beck? Obviously has the power over much of the populace - those who think art is all about liberal establishment pulling one over you. DO take him seriously. Like Bush the fools can wreck enormous havoc.

Carter Ratcliff, poet, art historian and critic, contributed an excellent comment on my Facebook page. Thanks Carter.

It would be great if a historian of 19th-century art were to make a top-100 list of the art world in, say, 1868, when Manet and the Impressionists were just hitting their stride. When I was writing about Sargent, I looked into the Paris and London art worlds in the 1860s, and I can assure you that no one we care about would turn up on a "Power 100 for 1868" list. That is is because the artists, critics, and collectors from that period that we now take seriously were not part of the power structure. The avant-garde of Manet and company obliterated the memory of the power structure of their time--and that raises a question. Is there, at present, an avant-garde that will, in future, obliterate the memory of the people on the "Power 100 for 2009"? I don't think so, and that is for complex reasons that can be summed up, schematically, by noting that the power structure has incorporated the avant-garde, not to mention the very idea of an avant-garde. Hardly an original thought. Everyone, including members of the power structure, has noted this great sweeping motion of cooptation. An inevitable thought: there is a false, coopted avant-garde and a real avant-garde just waiting to emerge. Or the new is the work of artists who will not be defined as an avant-garde but as something we do not yet know how to name. And there are other optimistic possibilities. The question is whether they are mere possibilities, utopian fantasies, or the cause for genuine hope. One must answer this question for oneself, all alone, like an artist in the studio.

Oliver Wasow responded:

Great thoughts, Carter, thanks. The one glaring omission from that list - and one that I suspect will shine even more brightly in 100 years - is any recognition of 'power players' involved in New Media. Seems to me that any artist and/or corportate entity/individual involved in the utilization or propogation of technologies that facilitate re-mix... Read More technology or the disemmination of viral creativity are a heck of a lot more "powerful" today than. say, Jasper Johns. I suppose as soon as people figure out a way to make some money off of web-based creativity, they will make the list.

Carter Ratcliff:

Yes, Oliver, good point, which gets to the heart of present situation--and it's true that re-mix technology could be coopted (to use that 60s word again) by the power structure, which is a market structure. It's all about the bottom line, if we bear in mind that wealth is calculated in units of social capital as well as dollars, euros, and so on. By focusing on Jasper Johns you highlight something crucial--the art-world power structure, the establishment, is invested, literally, in masterpieces or what it defines as masterpieces, and the idea of the masterpiece is still tightly bound to the mediums of painting and, to a lesser extent, sculpture. The traditional fine-art mediums. So nearly all the "important" artists on the power list are painters or sculptors or can be linked in some simple way to those mediums--the mediums of the masterpiece. Or, to put it another way, the mediums of the safest, most prestigious investments. As in the 1860s. Then, if an artist wanted to do more than join the power structure, it was enough to reinvent those mediums. Now artists have to employ--or invent--new mediums.

Oliver Wasow:

Right. Just when I had started to believe it was a Modernist myth, it's a little disheartening to think that we are still locked into a system where unrecognized and unpaid artists lead the way and are only recognized retrospectively. Enough to make a guy want to cut off his ear...

Carter Ratcliff:

Of course, I have now offended all painters by implying that if you paint you have two possibilities: you find a place on the establishment power list or you don't. This is not how I see it. I have always been interested primarily in painting and, ever since the late 60s, I have been troubled by the spectacle of painting losing ground to other, newer mediums. I think there is a lot of important painting being done now, as over the past four decades, yet I neither deny the value of the new mediums nor hold out for the idea that painting is now, as in the Renaissance, our primary visual medium. Painting, like poetry, is awkwardly adrift, at once buoyed up and dragged down by its illustrious history, and very unlikely ever to find a place at the head of the flotilla. Painting on canvas, lyric poems, novels, tragic plays--these can all be hopelessly boring and retrograde, yet they are still intelligible forms and mediums and they can be great. It's just that their great qualities will not and have not, for some time, included the virtue of seeming utterly new.

In response to Oliver and at the risk of sounding like a market guru-visionary-quack, I think it goes in cycles. There are periods when the best artists are recognized and periods when they are not. The former periods tend to be short and the latter long, as investors--collectors and curators--consolidate for their own, ultimately non-art purposes the "gains" made during a period when the best artists were quickly recognized. We have been in one of these dreary consolidation periods for a long time. Since 1979, possibly.