The 100 most important players in the art world: blood, flesh and tears

One of the art world’s end-of-year rituals is choosing the best exhibitions, most annoying events and most important players. “Monopoly” always uses this for a whole section in its December issues, because the art magazine not only determines the first three places, but also the first hundred. In this way, the magazine reliably shows who has left their mark on the art world the most in the past twelve months.

The exercise wasn’t particularly difficult this year, because the Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger managed to cause various audience members to collapse at the premiere in Stuttgart with her opera production “Sancta”: so much fake blood, enlarged cuts in the naked flesh with the camera, so much Horrible things on the open stage.

In the harder-boiled Berlin, the next tour stop, the production was already received as a weak Rocky Horror Holzinger show, but the performer and her intrepid ensemble deserve the credit for creating great images. The reactions to this, including death threats, demonstrate what scandal can lead to in art, which is actually a safe space should be. A sad realization.

Maybe that’s why “Monopol” quickly gives in with Paris in second place as the greatest art city of the past year: sensational fair, large galleries, great collectors and the chic of the fashion houses that jostle as sponsors in the renovated Grand Palais. Berlin can only dream of that and calculate what will still be possible after the cuts in the cultural budget in 2025.

In third place is the video artist Yael Bartana, who confidently performed in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with Ersan Mondtag. Some people may have felt dizzy here too, seeing the dancing maidens à la Leni Riefenstahl that were projected onto the apse of the Nazi building. But here too it proved that good art is not a couch – but rather a bed of nails like Florentina Holzinger’s.

Of course, various acquaintances from recent years appear again in the list: Max Hollein, the consistently successful director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, his Berlin colleague Klaus Biesenbach from the Neue Nationalgalerie, who is successfully reviving the comatose Cultural Forum, or Marion Ackermann as the future president the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which is moving over from the Dresden Art Collections in the new year, where it was able to gain experience in crisis management.

The gallery owners Iwan and Manuela Wirth, David Zwirner and Max Hetzler are sometimes placed higher up and sometimes further down in the ranking; they, along with their top artists, are reliably among the most important pullers. Only rarely do outsiders sneak in, but they are all the more pleasing: for example, the Muslim-Jewish couple Saba-Nur Cheema and Meron Mendel, who tirelessly fight against the division in the cultural scene caused by the Middle East conflict. In 2024 it received the Federal Republic’s Order of Merit for this.

In Berlin this week, Cheema and Mendel are continuing with the symposium they curated “Art and Activism in Times of Polarization.” on the occasion of the Nan Goldin exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie. A few positions below them in the ranking is the American artist whose activism and strong opinions on the opioid crisis or the war in Gaza are shaking up the art world. That too is a merit.