Jasper John's 'Land's End' (1982)
Town and Country Magazine has picked the five richest artists in the world As the story points out you most likely will know three of them and two might be somewhat strangers to the art world.
Here are the five:
1. Damien Hirst: $350 million
The Forbes 400 was first published in 1982, midway through Reagan's first term in office. We've been addicted ever since. But it isn't always easy to tell what someone did to get on that list. Did they inherit? Did they exploit a loophole in the tax code? Did they make some one thing cheaper, faster, smarter? Who knows?
That's why it's nice to have a list like this. Not because we're dying to know who sells the most expensive paintings but because this list can teach a lot about lists—after all, with artists all you have to do is look at their art to see if they really deserve to be here, or if they leveraged something other than artistic chops to arrive at the top.
Damien Hirst, who has been called a Young British Artist going on 25 years now, is a natural for the top spot. His entire lifework, alternately beautiful and meretricious, can be read as a sort of elaborate art world prank—take "For the Love of God," the diamond encrusted skull that he priced at $100 million. Is it a subtle condemnation of greed in the art world? It doesn't seem to matter to Hirst, whose vast profits from such joyously mercantile enterprises (he sold one show through Sotheby's, at another time his works were displayed at all 8 Gagosian galleries simultaneously) seem to be the punch line of the joke.
2. Jasper Johns: $210 million
The eminence grise of this list—Johns first took the title for "most expensive work by a living artist" in 1980 when the Whitney Museum bought his "Three Flags" for a million dollars, then re-took it in 2006 when the Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin bought "False Start" for $80 million—is also the most secure in his place in art history. But his elevated standing on this list is not without its dangers—this summer a studio assistant to the 83-year-old artist was investigated for reselling works pilfered from Johns' personal collection.
3. Andrew Vicari: $210 million
If you have never heard of Andrew Vicari, you are not alone. The artist has carved a lucrative niche as a portraitist to the Saudi nobility, commissions that have been rumored to sell for anywhere from $6 to $20 million a pop. His work is distinguished by its swirling Niemanesque use of color—he is without a doubt the world's best unquestionably bad artist.
4. Jeff Koons: $100 million
Jeff Koons has a remarkably Pop sensibility and with it a disturbingly unstable esthetic sense that Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker summed up in these terms: "Koons’s uncannily mediocre paintings suggest an insensibility in two dimensions that is as amazing, in its way, as his genius in three." But whatever their artistic value, his assorted sculptures, his balloon dogs and floating basketballs and his famous flowering "Puppy"—a forty foot tall West Highland terrier that Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour had him reproduce for their Connecticut estate—are Disneylike in their infectious marketability. He is also Disneylike in his creation of a studio that helps him fabricate such massive and expensive works at an impressive clip.
5. David Choe: $100 million
David Choe is not unknown as an artist. But the feat that he is best known for has little to do with his art: after he painted a mural on the walls of the office where a few Harvard dropouts were busy creating Facebook, he opted to take his $60,000 payment not in cash, which they had little of at the time, but in facebook stock. The gamble paid off handsomely when the startup went public.
Subscribe
