By Ossian Ward

Instinctively I have always judged artists according to my own arbitrary system of worth, based loosely on sporting league tables. Michelangelo, Velázquez, Goya, Manet and Picasso would feature in my version of the Premiership, NBA, NFL or World Series of Historical Artists. League Two might consist of El Greco, Cézanne, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Donald Judd while the lower divisions would be populated by the Renoirs, Bonnards, Schnabels and others that I deem third-rate, ripe for substitution or eminently droppable. I am not alone in this wilful categorisation. The recent World Cup prompted all kinds of Artist First XI teams and London’s National Gallery asked the British public to vote one of ten candidates ‘Greatest Painting in Britain’ last year, putting The Fighting Temeraire by Turner came out on the top, while Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ finished a less-than-divine ninth. Even the august critic and curator David Sylvester had a penchant for lists and tables that verged on the obsessive.

Since ArtReview first published its Power 100 list in 2002 it has created an annual frisson, often of the sensationalist media kind – ‘Shark pickler is most important man in art’ – or of the sniping, malicious kind, as if the whole thing were an elaborate joke or some shameless marketing tool for the magazine. Having been involved in the vetting, writing and editing of the first two Power 100 lists, I can vouch for the seriousness with which we approached the initial, seemingly mammoth, task of breaking down the art world into a sum of its most influential parts and then putting it back together to see what made it tick.

Among those trusted figures regularly consulted in the preparation of the first two editions, one of my most revealing exchanges was with the art critic Jerry Saltz, who has since been one of the Power 100’s most vociferous opponents. He complained that the lists excluded writers and critics (such as himself, natch), to which I replied that it would be a conflict of interest, because we writers and editors often employed critics (such as himself) and would be naturally biased. This was a rum excuse on my behalf, because it would have been relatively easy to name the most influential art writers of our time, and we included theorist Benjamin Buchloh and critic Robert Hughes in the first few issues.

It should come as no surprise that these lists have been based on such journalistic conjecture, albeit carefully judged and balanced journalistic conjecture, because the whole business of contemporary art is founded on pure speculation. Whether buying, selling, critiquing or making the stuff, the first question inevitably tends to be, is this work of art any good? And who says it is? The Power 100 was never meant to be a comprehensive list and neither did we view it as a way of wooing potential (or existing) advertisers, friends, colleagues or ‘people we’d most like to meet’. Instead, the inaugural list was beset by the obvious questions: how do you gauge power in such a complex, international web of social, commercial, aesthetic and intellectual concerns?

As there is no easy answer to this, we started compiling names that simply ooze power: Saatchi, Pinault, Lauder, Arnault, Broad, Jopling, Glimcher, Gagosian. These and a few others formed the backbone of the top twenty, although Larry Go-Go Gagosian was left fairly out in the cold for the first issue, at number 23. He would get his comeuppance by climbing to fourth, first and then second in subsequent years.)

The main problem with juggling all this mega-power is that no one knows what anyone else earns, sells, buys, borrows or hedges, so any estimates as to gallery turnover or a collector’s net worth can only ever be guesses. In Britain a hundred or so dealers – usually registered companies selling Old Masters or antiques – reveal sales totals or profit and loss accounts, which creates a fairly accurate top ten. So it seemed a good idea to include London gallery owner Richard Green at number 17 in the first Power 100, simply because he had been at number one in UK sales, on and off, for a number of years. Yet Green specialises in Old Masters, Impressionists and nineteenth-century pictures, and this is not the world we wished to address.

So in the second Power 100, in 2003, we limited the scope to those active in modern and contemporary art, ridding the list of first-round anomalies such as Andrew Lloyd Webber, Carmen Thyssen and Jacob Rothschild. Victorian art and Old Masters may eventually collide and integrate with the contemporary art world as more galleries diversify and more traditional collectors discover contemporary art, but in general, primary dealers have to first create the trends and shape the tastes before secondary dealers can profit from them. Commercial galleries have colonised the Power 100 lists for the past five years, rising from 18 entries in 2002 to 26 – just over a quarter of the total – in 2005, but can only be judged on their visibility and on residual signs of success such as multiple spaces, hot artists, big staffs and high production values.

Despite successfully plucking the most high-powered names we could find from the upper echelons of the art world, it was clear from the outset that this was never going to be simply a ‘Rich List’ – partly because of the comparative lack of financial transparency in the contemporary art world and because we knew there were other ways to wield power. Artists also exude power: Richter, Koons, Johns, Kiefer, Ruscha, Serra and Nauman represent the indelible stars whose careers have helped shape the past two decades of art practice. Underneath these godlike figures is a younger generation of mere mortals – Hirst, Murakami, Dean, Prince, Rauch, Cattelan – fighting it out among themselves for supremacy by winning prizes, museum shows and scoring record prices like heavyweight boxers or racehorses. The promotion of Damien Hirst to number one last year was a reflection of his fame, ubiquity and, most tellingly, of his huge earning potential on the back of a sellout gallery show and an auction of Pharmacy memorabilia that netted him £11 million in one evening. Arguably, this is influence not of an aesthetic or philosophical nature but rather of a commercially savvy, Warholian kind.

The list should be seen as a way to structure and navigate the art world, like a good speed dial set up on your phone. Whoever turns up at number one, two or three should give you a good indication of how important that person is to your life or livelihood. Similarly, placing art’s most influential people in order gives a snapshot of who is currently most in demand or in control. However, if that speed dial never changes – if you are constantly looking to the same handful of art world impresarios for inspiration – then the whole scene would quickly stagnate. General trends have emerged over the years – America leads the way, women are gaining prominence and architects are increasingly responsible for the environments in which many of us experience art. But the decidedly unsettled world of contemporary art must remain so. As long as the scene keeps on shifting and influences wax and wane, it will remain vibrant and interesting.