The 100 most iconic artworks from the last five years
And the top ten are ...
By Charlotte Simmonds Published 21 September 2012
Leading international art website ARTINFO has released a list of the “100 Most Iconic Artworks From the Last 5 Years”. The full list, released on their website this week, is an ambitious attempt to distill the past half-decade into its most memorable artistic moments. They put it thus:
From among the thousands of individual works that pass through galleries and museums, which have affected the conversation in some significant way? Amid all of contemporary art's chaotic installations and ephemeral gestures, which images have some staying power?
The top condenders were chosen by members of the ARTINFO staff, colleagues and several “distinguished outsiders”. The final cut – notably heavy on “art stars”, installations and performance pieces (Damien Hirst, Ai Weiwei, Marina Abromovic, Tino Seghal and Pussy Riot all make it in) – has sparked mixed reactions. We’ll let you be the judge. In the top ten slots:
1. Christian Marclay, "The Clock", 2010

Produced for the Lincoln Centre in New York, this piece of video art - spanning 24 hours - on a clock was built “collage” style from spliced film clips, each frame displaying an exact time.
2. Marina Abromovic, "The Artists is Present", 2010

Renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at the New York MOMA saw her spend three months across from an empty chair, in which thousands of visitors took a seat over the course of the exhibition.
3. Tino Sehgal, "This Progress", 2010

A participatory work in which volunteers guided visitors through the ascending levels of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, mirroring the passage of time.
4. Ai Weiwei,"Sunflower Seeds", 2010

The artist flooded the Tate Modern Turbine Hall with a hundred million seemingly identical hand-sculpted sunflower seeds, offering poetic comment on the notion of “made in China” and the nature of individuality.
5. Damien Hirst, "For the Love of God", 2007
YBA breakout star Damien Hirst stirred controversy in the art world once again when he covered this human skull with diamonds and sold it for $100 million.
6. Mark Wallinger, "State Britain", 2007

For his solo piece at the Tate Turbine Hall, Wallinger’s “ready-made” was a meticulous recreation of the anti-war encampment that was forcibly removed from outside London’s Houses of Parliament.
7. Voina, "A Dick Captured by the FSB", 2010
Street art? Establishment protest? The Russian art Voina collective shot to notoriety after tracing this phallus on a drawbridge outside the former KGB in Moscow.
8. Shepard Fairey, "Hope", 2008

The now-infamous portrait was appropriated by Fairey from an Asssociated Press photograph, and was soon absorbed into the visual iconography of Obama’s 2008 election campaign.
9. Pussy Riot, "Christ the Savior Cathedral performance", 2012

Feminist punk group/performance artists - and recent cause-célèbre - Pussy Riot’s most famous performance saw them perform on the alter at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow - then landed them in jail.
10. Allora & Calzadilla, "Track and Field", 2011

The American art duo devises this absurdist installation, in which an athlete used an overturned 60 ton military tank as a treadmill outside the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. “As brawny and bombastic as the nationalistic spectacles it was mocking”.
See the full list here.
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3 comments
A poor showing indeed, the knob outside the KGB is quite funny though.
Art requires the resonance of the sublime.
These tired, dada derived, unfunny, in-jokes have become a bore.
Art is made to enrich not demean human experience.
The wit of a Man Ray, the surprise of Matisse, the majesty of Brancusi, the power of "Guernica", the chilling pathos of Bacon, the character in a Sargent, the despair of Munch, any and all of these qualities and many more, utterly absent from the Saatchi/feely detritus depicted in the pusillanimous puffery of sycophantic hyperbole of this article.
How is any of the above "iconic"? Except, perhaps in the tiny, constricted and lazy minds of dupes of fashion that masquerade as artists today and their equally dull but greedy cheerleaders in the curatorial limbo of uncritical castrati fawning to be fey.
Feel the stupid. How it burns.
Modern art is impossible to judge, but I sense that if this is the best we can do, less than 100 years after the death of most of the Impressionists, then heaven help us. And to paraphrase a remark made by David Hockney, nothing recent looks any good if you put it next to a Piero della Francesca. Everything listed here seeks novelty above all else, relegating itself to the history of advertising. The best, most enduring art has always been spiritual and above all poetic, communicating a sense of the eternal or divine. There's precious little sign of that here. Think Pheidias, Piero, Michelangelo, Rembrandt - even Stanley Spencer!