Music has the Billboard chart, publishing has the New York Times bestseller list, and television has Nielsen.

But the visual art industry has never had a simple, clear-cut way to track who is gaining heat and market clout.

Yet one valuable art-market data point is the number of searches recorded for artists in Artnet’s Price Database. The queries aren’t free, which means those running them have skin in the game, and changing rankings can offer a snapshot of business interests and activity in particular artists, especially on the secondary market.

Below is a list of the top-searched artists on the Artnet Price Database in April 2021. (Those who had the same number of searches are listed as tied.) What can we learn from the list? Here’s some key takeaways.

Notable Fast Risers

–Salman Toor, the Pakistani American painter whose romantic images of queer life in New York City recently drew crowds to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Back in April 2020, Toor received exactly zero searches in the Price Database. Last month, that number shot up to 215, making him the 118th most-searched artist (right below Lucian Freud).

–Aboudia, the Brooklyn-based painter originally from Côte d’Ivoire, whose paintings look like the love children of Basquiat and Philip Guston. This time last year, his work was searched for 30 times; last month, that number was 214, tying him with market sensation Adrian Ghenie as the 119th most-searched artist.

–Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the late couple known for their epic public artworks. The duo has seen a great number of their preparatory sketches and other domestic-size works hit the auction block this year. (A sale of material from their studio fetched $9.8 million at Sotheby’s Paris in April.) It appears that interest remains high: their rank jumped from 141st in April 2020 to 38th in April 2021. 

–Banksy, the for-the-people street artist. Historically, Banksy has not been an evening-sale fixture. (His prints, however, are traded frequently at lower price points.) But the major New York auctions next week include four Banksys (two of which are in the multimillion-dollar price range), potentially contributing to the spike in searches. Last April, Banksy drew 775 searches, making him our 17th most-searched artist; this past month, that number spiked to 1,878, bringing him up to number 4.

See the list in full below.