SPECIAL FOCUS
Future Greats
Everyone who reads magazines like this one (or even ordinary newspapers and style magazines) knows that the
artworld is expanding at a faster rate than the universe. Over the last 12 months, we’ve used this organ to warble
on about the proliferation of art fairs and biennials, lament our struggle to keep up with endless new galleries and
the mailouts they send, and wonder how on earth we could ever see enough. You haven’t felt very sorry for us,
but you should.
When we were in New York recently, one well-known critic (we won’t mention his name, as we met over a
beer and can’t really be sure that these were the exact words he muttered into his flagon of ale; plus he looks like
the kind of person who might take ‘action’ to protect his ‘image’ if he thought we had ‘damaged’ it) said that his
job now consisted solely of worrying. Worrying about how he was going to see all the shows on his Chelsea beat
and then worrying that the ones he had actually made it to were probably the ‘wrong’ ones and that the ‘cool’
action was happening elsewhere. He kept asking us what we thought was ‘cool’, as if we’d reveal something
radically new (while secretly hoping that we’d confirm his own version of coolness – we could see it in his eyes),
but we had the sense that when you see as much as the well-known-but-nameless-for-the-purposes-of-this-
intro-and-our-legal-position critic, nothing seems new, because everything is just an endless fog of paranoia. Still,
we didn’t tell him that. Instead we made him feel that we were above his ‘games’. The truth is, we didn’t know
what to say – except that we save that information for our beloved readers and the Future Greats issue. You see,
as he didn’t mention ever worrying about deadlines, we decided it was too risky to ask him to write for us.
Anyhow, the point of all this is that selecting 30 Future Greats seems to have caused our panel of experts
a great deal of worry. Yes, loads of them said they ‘hadn’t seen enough’ (even though we saw them staggering
round endless art fairs and biennials and openings) or that some of the artists they were talking about last year
were still ‘on the cusp’. “What’s the future?”, they squealed before asking us if we meant the next 12 months or the
next 12 years. “What’s ‘great’?”, they asked, sighing and rolling their eyes skywards. The thing is that everyone has
a different opinion, even if, when we print those opinions on nice paper in a nice font, they look more like facts.
And that’s where the worry starts.
This year’s collection of artists is something of a mixed bag – from people just out of art college to people
who’ve been nominated for the Turner Prize (twice). You might think that the only thing that connects them all is
that we blindly picked the chosen few out of the same hat. But that’s not true. What’s important to remember is
that being on this list is not a cast-iron guarantee of greatness; it’s a statement of someone’s belief. The belief of
the person making the art being matched by the belief of a critic or writer that they (in the majority of cases, the
artists) are doing something worthwhile. Despite what you may frequently hear about power-crazed collectors
and dealers lying on piles of their not-so-hard-earned money and colluding in secluded palaces on desert islands
(owned, of course, by one of the ‘gang’) to cook up nefarious plots to manipulate the art market as if it were the
New York Stock Exchange rather than an essential piece of cultural dialogue, the artworld does function very
much on belief (and yes, sometimes people turn out to be Creationists).
79 Artreview
FUTURE~1.INDD 79 11/2/08 12:06:02
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