Let’s rank the artiste plasticien contemporain!
I’m fascinated by the artist ranking system on the ArtFacts website. Art, like pop music, is pretty hard to quantify; you like what you like. Nevertheless, like any human activity in the real world, art does leave behind it a data trail, a ‘spime slime’ (as Bruce Sterling might say). And the trail is quantifiable, rankable, chartable.

The ArtFacts data trail is concerned with attention, fame and exhibitions. Artfacts have devised an algorithm which ranks the 21,158 visual artists in their database according to where they’re showing their work and how often they show. The ranking does not reflect financial value of the artist’s work.

‘Attention (fame) in the cultural world is an economy that works with the same mechanisms as capitalism,’explains the ArtFacts site, citing Georg Franck’s concept of ‘the economy of attention’. ‘The artist ranking… orders artists by the professional attention invested in them. It provides the wider audience with a feeling for where a particular artist stands in the eyes of the professionals.’ The result? A series of nifty little graphs showing whether any given artist’s reputation is soaring or crashing over time, plus a Top 100 ‘chart rundown’ of the hottest artists, living and dead.
(Via Click opera)

And Picasso is back at number one – see title link.