THE GREATEST ARTISTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: FOURTH INTERIM REPORT ON SURVEY RESULTS (August 14, 2000)

On my return from the Alps, I found quite a number of responses to my survey of greatest artists, contrary to my feeling, conveyed in my previous report, that the entire exercise was winding down already. Susan Morris offers Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Alain Robbe Grillet, Robert Smithson, and Warhol. Danielle Arnaud reports excitement about the survey results to date and comes up with the following list: Bourgeois, Duchamp, Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Picabia, Picasso, Viola, and Warhol. As is the case with most artists who have responded so far, Emma Walker is very uneasy about the survey, but she still obliges me, presumably on family grounds: Beuys, Jorge Louis Borges, Bourgeois, Bob Dylan, Matisse, Morandi, The Necks (Australian experimental jazz trio), Pablo Neruda, Mimo Palladino, Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, and Tapies. Selçuk Avci ruminates about the meaning of the survey in our era, when art itself is in question, but he ends up with an intriguing list: Ranko Bon (sic), De Chirico, Tracy Emin, Anish Kapoor, Magritte, Malevich, and Picasso. Selçuk also reports the responses of his friend, Simon Townsend, who offers two names only: Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. Ella Guru reports the results coming from three of her friends: Dave Lancet comes up with Calder, Dalí, and Picasso; Terry Harnet offers Bacon, Giacometti, and Van Gogh; and J. Todd Dockery proposes Steve McQueen, Yoko Ono, and Charles Starkweather, but he also provides three runners up: J. Edgar Hoover, Jayne Mansfield, and Lee Harvey Oswald. As Billy Childish suggests in yet another message critical of the survey, what people are responding to, in their ignorance, is not the-greatest-artists question but the-most-famous-and-overblown-artists question. Myself excluded, of course.