The Ranking Project

Ars longa, ratio brevis

Art is not about the audience anymore but about the art world that successfully has overtaken art itself. Art doesn’t need to address society with its actual problems since self referencing and recasting existing cultural comments and interpretations has become the norm. Art suffers globalization even more than any other aspect of contemporary society and public life. Contemporary art is fully globalized and even the different representation of a particular local context is globally demanded.

Art or rather, the art world has lost its influence on society and its avantgarde status.

On the other hand technology is so rapidly developing and new media have so much changed and influenced society that even though the art world itself long resisted these processes it is eventually undergoing a technological transformation imposed as a social necessity. The role of social media in channeling an interest in art already surpases that of traditional mass media and of professional magazines. Artists ranking web platforms take over the job of art critics and even that of curators by showing to the audience directly the ‘score’ of an artist.

All this is not a surprise since the art world itself decided this hierarchical model of ranking artists as a meta form of evaluation and organization of artists’ careers as a way of dealing with the growing number of artists and the enormous amount of art production. This process of automatization of curatorial work mirrors the global tendency of optimization of office work that has already taken place in the fields of corporate management and finance resulting in rapid shrinking of the wannabe middle class office proletariat.