to make it is today. The concept of ranking artists according to the amount of attention they and their work receives is not a new concept. According to the Getty Museum “Fascinated by the high prices achieved by contemporary (postwar) art, the German art critic Willi Bongard developed a system, known as the Kunstkompass, for ranking artists based on indicators of fame. Using data gathered from museums, commercial art galleries, and art journal reviews, Bongard calculated the success of an artist from year to year and compared it to gallery prices, thus determining the artist’s investment potential.” The Kunstkompass top 100 contemporary artists continues to be published each year by Germany’s Capital magazine thanks to the efforts of Bongard’s widow, Linde Rohr-Bongard. ArtFacts.net have taken Bongard’s concept one step further and introduced a recently developed Career Analyser too which allows subscribers to see how an artist’s career has developed over the years and how their ranking has changed. According to ArtFacts.net “The Career Analyser Tool examines an artist’s career in the ranking system from two further perspectives: the position in the ranking and the score for each exhibition – both results are calculated over the years. The last object of the analysis is the “Peer Group”: on the basis of the different ranking careers, we detect the artist’s artistic entourage that is the artists with whom he/she usually exhibits in group exhibitions.” ArtFacts.net have also developed a separate Auction Analyser Tool in conjunction with ArtTactic.com which provides a detailed and in depth analysis of an artist’s career in the auction market.
With a total of just under 80,000 ranked artists, there is no shortage of information on ArtFacts.net so I urge everyone to take the time to check it out and purchase a subscription. It will be well worth your while
Top 100 Ranking
http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/ranking/paragraph/4/lang/1
Artfacts.net stats:
19,513
exhibitors worldwide
166
countries
216,913
exhibitions worldwide
229,700
artists biographies
79,338
ranked artist
16,608
works of art
1,421
catalogs
**Nicholas Forrest is an art market analyst, art critic and journalist based in Sydney, Australia. He is the founder of http://www.artmarketblog.com, writes the art column for the magazine Antiques and Collectibles for Pleasure and Profit and contributes to many other publications
