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Protest Art and Nude Photographers Drive artnet’s Top 300 Most Searched Artists in January
Shepard Fairey tops the list, thanks to his posters protesting Donald Trump.
Henri Neuendorf
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Every month, artnet keeps track of searches across its proprietary platforms to create an up-to-date list of the 300 most visited artists. The list provides interesting insights into the popularity of artists and the factors that drive it.
In January, Shepard Fairey stormed to number one thanks to his Donald Trump protest poster series “We the People,” featuring Muslim, Latino, and African-American women. Fellow street artist Banksy came in second place, whilst another street art favorite, KAWS, came in eighth.
Blue chip artists Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso came in third and sixth respectively, whilst erotic photographers Michael Dweck (fourth), Joch Sturges (fifth), Nobuyoshi Araki (seventh), and David Hamilton (10th) made up the largest chunk of the top 10. Sustained by interest in her impressive retrospective at New York’s Met Breuer, now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, street photographer Diane Arbus came in ninth.
Other January winners included Ed Ruscha, who climbed 49 places from 85th to 36th, thanks to widely-publicized reports that Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio bought a $125,000 work by the LA artist at a charity auction.
News of February exhibitions in New York at the New Museum and international gallery David Zwirner propelled Raymond Pettibon to 75th place, after he ranked in 147th place for December.
A demonstrator holds up a poster from the “We the People” campaign of US artist Shepard Fairey. Photo: GREGOR FISCHER/AFP/Getty Images.
Meanwhile, Peter Blake’s massive commission for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group was unveiled in London, and the publicity helped him climb from 128th place to 84th. The enormous artwork, which features almost 100 of London’s most prominent citizens, harkens back to the iconic cover he designed for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album in 1967.
A show of Kenneth Noland’s late work at Pace gallery’s midtown Manhattan space prompted artnet users to search the color field artist, helping him make the top 300 for the first time in 5 months, taking 93rd place.
On the other end of the list, James Rosenquist suffered a steep decline as interest in the pop artist subsided following a brief spike in searches prompted by false reports of the 83-year-old artists death.
Peter Blake mural for the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London. Courtesy of the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park.
The German shock artist Jonathan Meese dropped 65 places after a rare scandal-free month kept him off the headlines, resulting in fewer searches.
See the list of top artists for January below:
2. Banksy
3. Andy Warhol
5. Jock Sturges
8. KAWS
9. Diane Arbus
10. David Hamilton
11. Keith Haring
13. Nan Goldin
14. Helmut Newton
16. Marc Chagall
17. Victor Vasarely
18. David Hockney
19. Roy Lichtenstein
20. Alec Monopoly
21. Yayoi Kusama
22. Jim Dine
23. Salvador Dalí
24. Fernando Botero
25. Joan Miró
26. Damien Hirst
28. Sally Mann
29. Takashi Murakami
31. Gerhard Richter
32. Alexander Calder
33. René Magritte
34. Bernard Buffet
35. Max Laeuger
36. Ed Ruscha
37. Liu Bolin
38. Jackson Pollock
39. Leopold Munsch
40. Henri Matisse
41. Thomas Ruff
43. Wayne Thiebaud
44. Frank Stella
45. Andy Goldsworthy
46. Mr. Brainwash
49. Milo Manara
50. Jeff Koons
51. Gregory Crewdson
53. Raoul Dufy
54. Peter Doig
55. Saul Leiter
58. Jan van Beers
59. Francis Bacon
61. Rene Grönland
62. Yoshitomo Nara
63. Candida Höfer
64. Anselm Kiefer
65. Tracey Emin
66. Alex Katz
67. Jean Dubuffet
68. Pierre Soulages
69. Albert Anker
70. Anish Kapoor
71. Julian Opie
72. Andreas Gursky
73. Pierre et Gilles
74. Harland Miller
76. Raymond Pettibon
77. Garry Gross
78. Cy Twombly
79. Georg Baselitz
81. Bridget Riley
82. Cindy Sherman
83. William Klein
84. Peter Blake
85. Kees van Dongen
86. George Condo
87. Peter Max
88. Man Ray
90. Vik Muniz
91. Barbara Kruger
92. Egon Schiele
93. Kenneth Noland
94. Chuck Close
95. Jenny Saville
96. Richard Prince
97. Sigmar Polke
98. David LaChapelle
99. Albert Marquet
100. Maurice Utrillo
101. Grayson Perry
102. Tom Wesselmann
103. Karel Appel
104. Yves Klein
105. Emil Nolde
106. Sam Francis
107. Jenny Holzer
108. Grandma Moses
109. Helen Frankenthaler
110. Christopher Wool
111. Sol LeWitt
112. Cecily Brown
113. Katsushika Hokusai
114. George Grosz
115. Fernand Léger
117. Wassily Kandinsky
118. Thomas Struth
119. Paul Klee
120. Alberto Giacometti
121. Duane Michals
122. Peter Paul Rubens
123. Margaret Keane
124. Irina Ionesco
125. Daniel Richter
126. John Baldessari
127. RETNA
128. Otto Dix
129. Robert Motherwell
130. Rufino Tamayo
131. Willem de Kooning
132. Lucio Fontana
134. Josef Albers
135. William Kentridge
136. Jasper Johns
137. Friedensreich Hundertwasser
138. Antoni Tàpies
140. Joseph Beuys
141. Larry Clark
142. Louise Bourgeois
143. Brassaï
144. Hiroshi Sugimoto
145. Käthe Kollwitz
146. Boris Vallejo
147. Robert Longo
148. Max Ernst
149. Herb Ritts
150. Francis Picabia
151. Will McBride
152. Gustav Klimt
153. Christo and Jeanne-Claude
154. Richard Diebenkorn
155. Robert Indiana
156. Katharina Grosse
157. Kiki Smith
158. Arman
159. Hans Zatzka
160. Robert Combas
161. Irving Penn
162. Kehinde Wiley
163. Imi Knoebel
164. Gerda Wegener
165. Edward Burtynsky
166. Richard Estes
167. Claude Monet
168. Ronald Ventura
169. Jan Saudek
170. Bert Stern
171. David Lynch
172. Andrew Wyeth
173. Robert Doisneau
174. Edward Weston
175. Ellsworth Kelly
176. Georges Braque
177. Tony Cragg
178. Sonia Delaunay
179. Aslan
180. Erwin Olaf
181. Lucian Freud
182. Günther Uecker
183. Marina Abramovic
184. Arnulf Rainer
185. Markus Lüpertz
186. Janet Fish
187. Shirin Neshat
188. Swoon
189. Walasse Ting
190. Wolf Kahn
191. Annie Leibovitz
192. Ellen von Unwerth
193. Mel Ramos
194. Gio Ponti
195. Adrian Ghenie
196. Franz Xaver Frankl
198. Jeremy Mann
199. Patrick Demarchelier
200. Maurizio Cattelan
201. Vernon Ward
202. Julie Mehretu
203. Anton Pieck
204. Bettina Rheims
205. Kara Walker
206. Alfons Walde
207. Yaacov Agam
208. Nick Brandt
209. Harding Meyer
210. Agnes Martin
211. Pierre Bonnard
212. Joan Mitchell
213. Andres Serrano
214. Antony Gormley
215. Montague Dawson
216. Ernesto Neto
217. Le Corbusier
218. Marilyn Minter
219. Hans Hartung
220. Patrick Hughes
221. Wifredo Lam
222. Duane Hanson
223. A.R. Penck
224. Massimo Vitali
225. Elizabeth Peyton
226. Vanessa Beecroft
227. Henry Moore
228. Walton Ford
229. Miquel Barceló
230. Lyonel Feininger
231. Brice Marden
232. William Eggleston
233. Pierre Alechinsky
234. Dennis Sheehan
235. Sean Scully
236. Auguste Rodin
237. Jean Prouvé
238. Edgar Degas
239. Niclas Castello
240. Donald Judd
241. Tammam Azzam
243. Richard Serra
244. James Rizzi
245. Charlotte Perriand
246. Franz Kline
247. Zao Wou-Ki
248. René Gruau
249. Vija Celmins
250. Georges Rouault
251. Mark Ryden
252. Ludwig Meixner
253. Benedicto Cabrera
254. Edvard Munch
255. Erich Heckel
256. Mel Bochner
257. Mark Rothko
258. Yue Minjun
259. Thomas Hart Benton
260. Elliott Erwitt
261. Anna Gasteiger
262. Lucien Clergue
263. Graham Sutherland
264. Per Kirkeby
265. Erwin Wurm
266. Romero Britto
267. Russell Young
268. Eduardo Chillida
269. Emmet Gowin
270. Peter Beard
271. Peter Lindbergh
272. Zdzislaw Beksinski
273. Manolo Valdés
274. Albrecht Dürer
275. James Rosenquist
276. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
277. Richard Avedon
278. Stanley Donwood
279. Jean Cocteau
280. Jonathan Meese
281. Sue Coe
282. Julian Schnabel
283. Heinrich Zille
284. Roberto Matta
285. Ren Hang
286. Camille Pissarro
287. Paul Gauguin
288. Marlene Dumas
289. Bo Bartlett
290. Beatriz Milhazes
291. André Kertész
292. Tamara de Lempicka
293. Elizabeth Catlett
294. Fabienne Verdier
295. Chris Ofili
296. Marino Marini
297. Peter Howson
298. Milton Avery
299. Qi Baishi
300. Gabriel Orozco
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