The eagerly awaited Top 100, rankings compiled by the British magazine ArtReview and the German magazine Monopol, have been published. These rankings offer a list of the most powerful and influential personalities in the art world for 2022.

The tendency to extend the rankings to movements, ideas and ‘immaterial entities’ has in the past editions rewarded movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo or the ‘immaterial entity’ Erc-721, token of the Ethereum network. For 2022, the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, curators of Documenta 15 (ranked 1st on ArtReview and 2nd on Monopol) and Cecilia Alemani (ranked 2nd on ArtReview and 4th on Monopol), curator of the Venice Biennale 2022, reach the podium. Also interesting is the presence in the rankings of the Unions, the workers’ unions and their struggles for art workers, in 3rd place on Art Review.

THE RUANGRUPA COLLECTIVE

Founded in 2000 in Jakarta, the ruangrupa collective was the first collective from Asia to curate Documenta, the five-year Kassel exhibition now in its 15th year. And it was precisely from the German city that the project envisioned by ruangrupa questioned the nature, meaning and role of art in contemporary society, calling together groups, associations, artists and activists to work on the concept of “lumbung”, an Indonesian term that identifies the place where the surplus rice harvest is stored, to share fortunes and misfortunes with the entire community without leaving anyone behind.

Although the collective’s curatorial work has received harsh criticism, it is also true, at least according to Monopol, that their work has catalysed collective attention and media discussion as never before. Moreover, for the first time ever, the Documenta exhibition was curated by a group of artists and not by a professional curator: the choice of ruangrupa, and their recognition in the rankings, thus testifies to a complex interpretation of power, which lies not only in established hierarchies but also in the imagination and definition of divergent and non-traditional trajectories, which rekindle the spotlight on the social and political function of art.

CECILIA ALEMANI

Also on the podium was Italian curator Cecilia Alemani with her 59th Venice Biennale ‘The Milk of Dreams’, an edition that achieved the highest attendance ever recorded at the major international event. With a crowd of visitors from all over the world, the Alemani-led Biennale rewarded a vision of art aimed at expanding the canon of artistic research even to underestimated projects, excluded from an ‘elitist’ art history that had hitherto favoured a more traditional and westernising approach, also by involving more female artists and non-binary subjectivities.

UNIONS

The claims of the associations of female and male art workers do not go unmentioned: on the third step of the podium at Monopol are the Unions and the battles opened all over the world to demand decent conditions and full rights for workers in the sector. A sector, that of the arts, which seems to be experiencing a tear in that apparent, and in reality schizophrenic, balance between top positions, income and the current poverty that often also affects workers, who are paid but underpaid or lack the minimum protection.