Art World
November’s Top 300 Artist Searches Dominated by Photography and Politics
What do artnet users' searches teach us about the market?
What do artnet users' searches teach us about the market?
Henri Neuendorf ShareShare This Article
What artists are artnet users searching for? Every month we put the results of user searches across artnet’s proprietary platforms under the microscope and analyze what the results tell us about what drives artist popularity and how it reflects the state of the art market, and more broadly the art world.
As the shameful rape scandal surrounding controversial photographer David Hamilton, known for his depictions of nude adolescent girls, continues to unfold, the British artist took the top spot in November for the second consecutive month. In October French television presenter Flavie Flament accused the 84-year-old of abusing her when she posed for him at the age of 13. Hamiton had denied the accusations.
Second place was again occupied by Jock Sturges, another controversial photographer known for portraying nude young women. British street art favorite Banksy took third again, whilst blue-chip pop artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat took fourth and fifth places; the latter benefiting from a surge of searches to climb 15 places after a strong showing in the fall auctions, which included the $8.8 million sale of Air Power, formerly of David Bowie’s collection.
Pablo Picasso took sixth place, whilst photographer Diane Arbus dropped to seventh; fellow snappers Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe took eighth and ninth respectively. Mapplethorpe jumped nine places to get into the top 10, propelled by a two-person show with Jurgen Teller at London’s Allison Jacques gallery, which opened last month. Keith Haring rounded off the top 10.
As always the list gets more interesting outside of the top 10, which is routinely occupied by erotic photographers and blue-chip artists.One clear winner in November was Yayoi Kusama. Thanks to the start of a North American tour of the artist’s insanely popular Infinity Rooms at Washingotn DC’s Hirschhorn Museum, the octogenarian Japanese artist climbed from 29th to 17th place as more and more artnet users researched her work.
Some very politically incorrect remarks by German star artist Gerhard Richter, who made headlines for sharply criticizing the refugee policy of chancellor Angela Merkel, helped the painter move from 37th to 25th spot.
Elsewhere Barbara Kruger’s politically charged cover design for the November edition of New York Magazine, which (incorrectly) proclaimed president-elect Donald Trump as “LOSER,” helped her move up the ranks from 131st to 53rd place, as users enthusiastically searched for more examples of her work.
On the other side of the scale, Agnes Martin dropped 97 places from 85th to 182nd as hype and interest for her much-heralded solo retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum dramatically wore off.
See the list of top artists for November below:
2. Jock Sturges
3. Banksy
4. Andy Warhol
7. Diane Arbus
8. Nan Goldin
10. Keith Haring
11. KAWS
12. Bernard Buffet
13. Helmut Newton
15. Roy Lichtenstein
16. Max Jensen
17. Yayoi Kusama
18. David Hockney
19. Victor Vasarely
20. Alec Monopoly
21. Sally Mann
22. Marc Chagall
24. Shepard Fairey
25. Gerhard Richter
26. Fernando Botero
27. Andy Goldsworthy
28. Takashi Murakami
29. Salvador Dalí
30. Joan Miró
31. Damien Hirst
32. Jim Dine
33. Thomas Ruff
34. René Magritte
35. Liu Bolin
36. Wayne Thiebaud
37. Alexander Calder
41. Jeff Koons
43. Andreas Gursky
44. Frank Stella
45. Anselm Kiefer
48. Peter Doig
49. Tanja Playner
50. Mr. Brainwash
51. Egon Schiele
52. Yoshitomo Nara
53. Barbara Kruger
54. Henri Matisse
56. Candida Höfer
57. Vik Muniz
58. Raoul Dufy
59. Jean Dubuffet
60. Tomás Sánchez
61. Pierre Soulages
62. Gregory Crewdson
64. Francis Bacon
65. Alex Katz
66. Jenny Holzer
67. Milo Manara
68. Grayson Perry
69. Andrea Appiani
70. Cindy Sherman
71. Adrian Ghenie
72. Tom Wesselmann
73. Man Ray
75. George Condo
76. William Klein
77. Peter Blake
78. Tracey Emin
79. Fernand Léger
80. Margaret Keane
81. George Grosz
82. Marina Abramovic
85. Bridget Riley
86. Ed Ruscha
87. Emil Nolde
88. Julian Opie
89. Georg Baselitz
90. Duane Michals
91. Rufino Tamayo
92. Bert Stern
96. Sol LeWitt
97. Carl Nonn
98. David LaChapelle
99. Cy Twombly
100. Käthe Kollwitz
101. Saul Leiter
102. Josef Albers
103. Chuck Close
104. Sam Francis
105. Swoon
106. Kiki Smith
107. Otto Dix
108. Will McBride
109. Thomas Struth
110. Jenny Saville
111. Daniel Richter
112. Anish Kapoor
113. Paul Klee
114. Pierre et Gilles
115. Robert Indiana
116. Joseph Beuys
117. Tony Cragg
118. Sigmar Polke
119. Kehinde Wiley
120. Maurice de Vlaminck
121. Helen Frankenthaler
122. Peter Max
123. Irina Ionesco
124. Günther Uecker
125. Albert Marquet
126. Robert Longo
127. Willem de Kooning
128. Francis Picabia
129. Harland Miller
130. Hiroshi Sugimoto
131. Antoni Tàpies
132. Max Ernst
133. Robert Motherwell
134. Herb Ritts
135. Alberto Giacometti
136. Maurice Utrillo
137. Marilyn Minter
138. William Eggleston
139. Karel Appel
140. Yves Klein
141. Markus Lüpertz
142. Kees van Dongen
143. Garry Gross
144. Katsushika Hokusai
145. Nick Brandt
146. Zao Wou-Ki
147. Jackson Pollock
148. Ellsworth Kelly
149. John Baldessari
150. Mel Ramos
151. Jasper Johns
152. Christopher Wool
153. Arman
154. Irving Penn
155. Lucio Fontana
156. Louise Bourgeois
157. Imi Knoebel
158. Richard Prince
159. Brassaï
160. RETNA
161. Richard Estes
162. Georges Braque
163. Kara Walker
164. Friedensreich Hundertwasser
165. Kazuo Shiraga
166. Raymond Pettibon
168. Ronald Ventura
169. Grandma Moses
170. Jeremy Mann
171. Wifredo Lam
172. Aslan
173. Bettina Rheims
174. Pierre Molinier
175. Shirin Neshat
176. Erwin Wurm
177. David Lynch
178. Claude Monet
179. Ernesto Neto
180. George Morrison
181. Erich Heckel
182. Agnes Martin
183. Jan Saudek
184. Hans Zatzka
185. Jean Prouvé
186. Harding Meyer
187. Sean Scully
188. Niclas Castello
189. Walasse Ting
190. Andres Serrano
191. Sue Coe
192. Edward Weston
193. Janet Fish
194. Stephan Balkenhol
195. Le Corbusier
196. Per Kirkeby
197. Erwin Olaf
198. Annie Leibovitz
199. Georges Rouault
200. Martin Parr
201. Edvard Munch
202. Roberto Matta
203. Julian Schnabel
204. Robert Doisneau
205. Deborah Butterfield
206. Adolf Stademann
207. Pierre Alechinsky
208. Larry Clark
209. Lyonel Feininger
210. Anton Pieck
211. Hieronymus Bosch
212. Julie Mehretu
213. Richard Avedon
214. Mel Bochner
215. Duane Hanson
216. John Currin
217. Joan Mitchell
218. Giorgio de Chirico
219. Gustav Klimt
220. Slinkachu
221. Beatriz Milhazes
222. Ellen von Unwerth
223. Eduardo Chillida
224. Antony Gormley
225. Andrew Wyeth
226. Fritz Aigner
227. Ai Weiwei
228. Massimo Vitali
229. Pierre Bonnard
230. Richard Diebenkorn
231. Hans Hartung
232. Jonathan Meese
233. Otto Piene
234. Miquel Barceló
235. Igor Mitoraj
236. Gio Ponti
237. Graham Sutherland
238. Lucian Freud
239. René Gruau
240. Donald Judd
241. Edward Burtynsky
242. Jean Paul Riopelle
243. Vernon Ward
244. Auguste Rodin
245. Yaacov Agam
247. Lucien Clergue
248. Arnulf Rainer
249. Charlotte Perriand
250. Yue Minjun
251. Claude Lalanne
252. Gerda Wegener
253. Ansel Adams
254. Max Bill
255. Elizabeth Catlett
256. Philip Guston
258. Albrecht Dürer
259. Walton Ford
260. Vanessa Beecroft
261. Giorgio Morandi
262. Romero Britto
263. Dennis Sheehan
264. Darren Almond
265. Peter Lindbergh
266. Peter Beard
267. Jean Cocteau
268. Alfons Walde
269. Stanley Donwood
270. Piet Mondrian
271. Jeff Muhs
272. Martin Kippenberger
273. Alighiero Boetti
274. Frank Auerbach
275. Jörg Immendorff
276. Edgar Degas
277. Marlene Dumas
278. Ettore Sottsass
279. Milton Avery
280. Patrick Hughes
281. Gary Hume
282. André Kertész
283. Günther Förg
284. Manolo Valdés
285. Chu Teh-Chun
286. Diego Rivera
287. Malick Sidibé
288. Wolf Kahn
289. Leonora Carrington
290. Alice Neel
291. Marie Laurencin
292. Cecily Brown
293. Richard Serra
294. Emmanuel Villanis
295. Alphonse Mucha
296. Patrick Caulfield
297. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
298. Maurizio Cattelan
299. Serpieri
300. Jean Royère