"Art Power 100" ranking: The blockchain has art under control

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Blockchain technology, now also in art

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The old heavyweights like Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner have long known that the art trade is getting more and more complicated.

Nevertheless, you will

by this ranking, because it is always a prophecy.

This year it sends a clear message: The sole rule of gallery owners over the art world is a thing of the past - and it will remain so.

Where their names used to be, on the list of the mighty of art, now resides a cryptic formula: »ERC-721«.

The formula heads a list that is expected to surge annually.

The "Art Power 100" ranking of the "ArtReview" magazine is considered the "Forbes" list of art influencers.

Anyone who ends up there has shaped the scene and will continue to shape it in the future.

In the past, these were mainly gallery owners, ultra-rich collectors or popular curators. Only a few artists made it into the top ten places. Their work forms the basis of the art world, but only those who trade or exhibit their works are powerful. The »Power 100« highlights an old dilemma every year: Without marketers and salespeople, artists hardly stand a chance.

Why is the code

in first place?

It is a certificate on the Ethereum blockchain.

Blockchains are decentralized databases that visibly save all changes.

ERC-721 made a

career last year because it is used to create so-called

(NFT),

database entries that can sign works of art and thus make them an original that cannot be copied.

Explosion of the digital

With NFTs, digital art, which for a long time

could be reproduced at will

using

, has experienced an enormous appreciation.

Technology has turned virtual works of art into unique pieces, as rare as handmade sculptures that are traded and collected.

This promptly turned into huge business. Never before has so much money been spent on digital art or collectibles as in 2021. Auction platforms kept reporting new top prices for pixelated graphics, tweets or video clips from basketball players, but also for digital art. A new wealthy clientele is currently rushing to buy artificial art in artificial worlds.

The spectacular highlight was the auction of the collage "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" by graphic designer Beeple at Christie's auction house for a staggering 69 million dollars. The buyer of the 69 million graphic is a crypto impresario who goes by the name

. Behind this is the entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan, who runs the NFT fund Metapurse in Singapore. Metakovan's purchase now ranks 42nd in the »Power 100«, and artist Ai Weiwei (39th), curator Hans Ulrich Obrist (40) and collector Julia Stoschek (43) are equally influential.

Even when it comes to Bitcoin, Ethereum and NFTs: A super-rich elite still set the tone in the world of art.

It is often emphasized that with NFTs every creative can sell their digital works themselves on appropriate marketplaces and is therefore no longer dependent on gallery owners.

Unfortunately, this is only an emancipatory side effect of the fact that entrepreneurs in the unregulated crypto industry are currently occupying entire business areas for themselves.

You will be in charge in the future.

Galleries flop, Documenta top

equally enterprising

when he founded Facebook in 2004. Today his empire includes Instagram, Whatsapp and Oculus, among others.

And Zuckerberg continues to work on his digital visions.

In October he presented his virtual world Metaverse - for this reason alone, Zuckerberg is also one of the »Power 100«.

It is true that it forms the footnote of the ranking with 100th place.

But it shows that ultra-rich tech visionaries pervade many areas of life, including art.

With the slowly crumbling power of traders like David Zwirner (23rd place), Larry Gagosian (25) and Iwan and Manuela Wirth (26), the list also seems to show that artists and thinkers are becoming stronger in their influence.

In addition to ERC-721, the top 5 include an anthropologist, a curatorial collective and two artists:

The

, from whom many artists and exhibition organizers feel inspired, takes

.

Last year, her major project “Feral Atlas” was ranked 15th. Tsing examines the age of the Anthropocene by collecting data on ecological catastrophes with scientists, artists and anthropologists.

In

is the Indonesian collective

, which will be heading the Documenta in Kassel next year, the world's most important exhibition for contemporary art.

Ruangrupa wants to do a lot differently.

Practices such as participation, teamwork, the right to have a say and sustainability should be in the foreground, the list of participants published so far is more remote from the market than ever before.

In

,

the first artist named.

The black American went from urban planner to conceptual artist and expresses the division of America and structural racism with sculpture and architecture, installation and performance, often about urban renewal and the questioning of power relations.

In

, the German performance star

is now

considered the most influential artist worldwide at the »Power 100«.

She recently performed her radical, four-hour work "Natures Mortes" at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in which she brought together elements from group exhibitions, performances and concerts.