The most influential artistic personality of 2020? For Art Review, it's Black Lives Matter

A novelty that is already causing much discussion is the one that the U.S. art magazine Art Review has introduced in its Power 100, the ranking that, every year, the magazine publishes on its website and which includes what it considers to be the hundred most influential personalities in the art world. What is new is that, for the first time, the top spot on the list is occupied not by an artist, critic or art movement, but by an activist movement, namely Black Lives Matter, which made international headlines this year for sparking protests following the murder of George Floyd.

For Art Review, Black Lives Matter is the most influential art personality of the year: after all, it is a fact that a great many museums around the world have seized on the message launched by the movement to update their exhibition policies (and in some cases their acquisition policies as well), that various art events have given a lot of space to black culture, and that everyone has been talking, good or bad, about what was happening in the United States in the wake of the BLM protests (which, moreover, is a new entry in Art Review’s Power 100 ). This is not the first time that an activist movement has entered the ranking: it had already happened for #MeToo, which was also present in the 2020 ranking, even in fourth place (from 21st in 2019).

The second place, however, is occupied by the ruangrupa collective, a group of Indonesian artists (for them a climb of eight places from 10th in 2019) who have been entrusted with the curatorship of the next edition of Documenta, and whose art addresses, also in their case, themes such as colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Colonialism that, in some way, thus occupies the entire podium, since third place is occupied by the two academics Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, authors of an influential report on African art preserved in French museum collections, and which is having significant consequences on the policies of repatriation (i.e., return) to non-European countries of objects deemed to be of illicit origin. The first “single” artist on the list is Arthur Jafa, Golden Lion winner at the 2019 Venice Biennale, author of the masterpiece Love is the message, the message is death, and also a standard bearer of black culture: he is in sixth place (up from 34th in 2020).

The first figure not directly involved in matters of urgent current affairs is, in seventh place, the director of New York’s MoMA, Glenn D. Lowry (though nonetheless, it can be said that the U.S. museum’s new layout was also designed to highlight some of the issues facing society today). Italy, however, is far from the top positions. The first Italian encountered in the ranking is collector Miuccia Prada, in 35th place (down: she was at 11th in 2019), followed by curator Cecilia Alemani (48th, new entry), collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (68th, down from 55th in 2019), curator Lucia Pietroiusti (78th, in 2019 she was 92nd), Anglo-Italian curator Alessio Antoniolli (87th, new entry), and Galleria Continua founders Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi, and Maurizio Rigillo (at 93rd, gaining one position from 2019). Disappearing from the ranking are two of the Italians present in 2019: Massimiliano Gioni and Massimo De Carlo.

Is this a ranking that really responds to reality? It is obviously a point of view, of an American magazine that evaluates the world scene through the U.S. filter, but it can still provide some indications and it is a tool that many insiders discuss every year.

The most influential artistic personality of 2020? For Art Review, it's Black Lives Matter

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