Contemporary art (2) - Richard Cork is alarmed to find that artists count for little on a list of the powerful

The year is 2001, and Madonna hands over the Turner Prize cheque to the intensely controversial Martin Creed for his empty room where the lights go on and off. Uttering a four-letter swear word live on Channel 4 before the 9pm watershed, she tells the assembled audience: "Art is always at its best when there is no money, because it is nothing to do with money and everything to do with love."

Somehow I doubt if many of the people on Power 100, the latest list of heavyweight movers in the feverish world of modern art, would understand what on earth Madonna was talking about. Looking through the roll-call of names, published in the latest issue of Art Review, I soon began to feel that it all hinged on extreme wealth. Whether Madonna approves or not, Martin Creed's financial prospects were given a huge boost by his Turner Prize win.

Iwan Wirth, the 34-year-old dealer displaying Creed's new show of balloons in the swankiest of Piccadilly premises, has climbed to number 11 on the list. With his wife, Ursula Hauser, whose family owns a retailing fortune, Wirth now has high-profile galleries in New York, Zurich, St Gallen and London.

But even Wirth pales beside Larry Gagosian, known to his friends as GoGo. The ultimate self-made businessman, Gagosian began his stellar career selling bargain-basement posters. Now he has shot to the top of Power 100 as a hugely successful dealer with five galleries in Beverly Hills, New York and London. His latest venture, a monumental space near King's Cross Station, opened this year with a spectacular array of new paintings by the veteran artist Cy Twombly, whose work can command as much as $5.5m on the market. GoGo sure knows how to put on a show: in the past few years, I have seen enormous exhibitions by Damien Hirst and Richard Serra at Gagosian's New York gallery. They both felt more like museum-scale events than dealer's offerings.

So maybe it is significant that Gago- sian is placed above Glenn Lowry in Power 100. Lowry, whose big directorial moment will arrive later this month with the long-awaited reopening of New York's Museum of Modern Art, has been instrumental in raising the colossal $850m needed to revamp and extend the classic old Manhattan premises. It promises to be a formidable achievement by any standards. But according to Power 100, Lowry is eclipsed by a dealer able to wield an even more supreme influence than does the MoMA director.

The barriers formerly separating one sphere of the art world from another are being torn down. Take Maurizio Cattelan, who has risen to become the top-ranking artist on the new list. He first came to prominence as the brazen producer of works as inflammatory as his sculpture of the Pope struck down by a meteorite, which was shown in the Royal Academy's "Apocalypse" exhibition in 2000. Since then, the resourceful Cattelan has diversified tirelessly, producing magazines, starting a gallery and, in the near future, curating the Berlin Biennial.

A similar appetite for crossover acti-vities has made Takashi Murakami the second-ranking artist - not for his artworks, expensive though they are, but for his role in creating more than $300m worth of Louis Vuitton merchandise. Then there is his ability to create "the entire visual identity" of Tokyo's upmarket Roppongi Hills development with the recently opened Mori Art Museum, lodged at its centre.

However, the alarming truth is that artists count for little in Power 100. They are overwhelmed on the list by an avalanche of gallerists (the posh name for dealers), collectors, fair directors and even a website called e-flux, which sends out a daily art mailing to 33,000 avid readers across the world. In fact, if Power 100 is to be believed, unimaginably rich collectors are rapidly taking control of the art world. Take Eli Broad, a billionaire real-estate king whose Art Foundation lends work to museums on a huge scale. By donating $60m to extend the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Broad did not simply earn the city's gratitude: the gift gave him the right to select the architect of the museum's new wing, as well as creating an independent board to oversee its construction and the acquisition fund.

Power indeed, and Broad is by no means alone. Peter B Lewis, another US billionaire, who made his fortune insuring cars belonging to high-risk drivers, gave $50m to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. But on one condition. Lewis, who is the Guggenheim's chairman, told its globally ambitious director, Thomas Krens, that the money would be withdrawn if the museum did not stop financially over-reaching itself.

Not all collectors are allowed to have their own way. The notorious Mick Flick, whose grandfather was Germany's richest Nazi and employed 40,000 slave labourers in his factories, does not pay tax on his immense wealth. But when he offered his ample collection on loan to museums in Munich and Zurich, they both turned it down. Yet Flick is nothing if not persistent: he finally persuaded Berlin to borrow his treasures.

Other art moguls are equally resilient. Francois Pinault, a French retail billionaire who bought Christie's six years ago, was forced to pay out a daunting $256m fine in 2000. Despite selling key items from his collection, he is still pushing ahead with a big new £100m art foundation on the Seine. Designed by the leading architect Tadao Ando, it aims to play a galvanic part in Parisian cultural life.

Charles Saatchi made a similar effort by relocating his collection to County Hall. Paying visitors have poured in, ignoring the critics who have been far less enthusiastic. As if to reflect these rotten reviews, Power 100 has pushed Saatchi down from six to 17 on the list. Next year, the undaunted collector will transform himself into a cheerleader for "The Triumph of Painting", a very bewildering move for the former champion of multimedia Britart.

No wonder Damien Hirst, who was once Saatchi's favourite enfant terrible, has spent roughly £15m buying back 12 of his own works from the collector. Hirst obviously wants to wrest back control over his art, yet he could not prevent Power 100 from pushing him down from 49 to 78 on the new list. But nobody should underestimate Hirst's continuing ability to attract well-heeled punters. Only last month, the dismantled fittings of his Pharmacy restaurant in Notting Hill exceeded all expectations by fetch-ing £11m at auction. However much Madonna may protest that art "is everything to do with love", the bidders at that astonishing sale were unashamedly motivated by other, far greedier urges.

Four paperbacks of Richard Cork's critical writings on modern art were published last year by Yale University Press

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