People love to find out about our world in a vertical order: Who’s richest, who’s the best and worst dressed, which is the greatest city to live in, and so on. Art is no exception. Art Review, for example, publishes its ‘Power 100’ list every November since 2002, to give us insight of whom we should be rubbing shoulders with at the next private view.
We all agree that art in its purest form can only be subjective, and therefore a hierarchical ordering will seem to some as misleading. But the politics and practicalities of art as commodity inevitably demand an objective value for artworks in the real world, creating tensions between what the market determines as valid and what art professionals acknowledge as credible. M_KOS actually find this tension healthy, and as opposed to over-protecting itself by isolation, art needs to come to terms with its own commodification, which is nowadays the condition for art to circulate and be seen. The later rings particularly true with Canadian art. Inversely, the total absence of artist accomplishment guidelines would probably allow more relativity than subjectivity, leaving us stranded in an unchartered constellation of self-proclaimed stars.