Monthly Archives: August 2021

Personal Preferences: A Break from Meta-Lists

Leave a reply

I spend most of my time on Make Lists, Not War compiling best-of lists made by other people into meta-lists.  I find this to be an enjoyable pastime – I always learn a lot making each meta-list, and the number of hits the website gets from folks around the world indicates that these lists are useful and/or interesting to other people.

But what about my personal best-of lists?  Like so many listers out there, I love to make lists of my favorites.  I keep running tallies of the books, films, and albums that I have rated 5/5 stars.  These lists are quite long (295 books, 266 films, and 245 albums).  Those lists are available on the website.  But recently I decided to make smaller lists of favorite albums and favorite books – I decided to limit myself to just 150 books and albums (I didn’t try this with movies – too painful).  So these aren’t all my favorites, just some of them.

Here are the links:

My 150 Favorite Albums
My 150 Favorite Books

If you want to see all my favorites, here are the links to my five-star rated books, movies and albums:

My Five-Star Books
My Five-Star Films
My Five-Star Albums 

Getting Closer to Now: The Revised Contemporary Artists Meta-List

Leave a reply

I’ve revised the meta-list of contemporary artists (and selected works) by adding 10 more lists, bringing the total number of original source lists to more than 20.  I first created this meta-list in 2015 and a great deal has happened in the art world since then, so this new list has a lot more artists.  In fact, there are 44 new artists on the list, from all over the world.  Here are their names, dates, and countries where they have worked.  For each artist, I researched their more-often mentioned works of art by doing an informal Internet survey.  I have added these new works of art (there are several hundred) to my visual arts checklist and also to the geographical lists that tell where you can find the artwork.  Many of the listed artworks cannot be found in museums, but may be viewed at occasional exhibitions or installations, or at certain art galleries.

Here is the link for the revised list: Best Contemporary Artists.

Here are the 44 new artists on the list, organized chronologically by date of birth:

  1. Donald Judd (US, 1928-1994)
  2. Dan Flavin (US, 1933–1996)
  3. Christo and Jeanne-Claude (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff: Bulgaria/France, 1935-2020) (Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon: Morocco/France, 1935–2009)
  4. Eva Hesse (Germany/US, 1936–1970)
  5. Frank Stella (US, 1936- )
  6. Robert Smithson (US, 1938–1973)
  7. Gilbert and George (Gilbert Prousch: Italy/UK, 1943- )(George Passmore: UK: England, 1942- )
  8. Jörg Immendorff (Germany, 1945–2007)
  9. Sean Scully (Ireland/US, 1945- )
  10. Marina Abramović (Yugoslavia (Serbia)/Netherlands/France/Germany, 1946- )
  11. Chris Burden (US, 1946- )
  12. Luo Zhongli (China, 1948- )
  13. Barbara Kruger (US, 1949- )
  14. Jenny Holzer (US, 1950- )
  15. Julian Schnabel (US, 1951- )
  16. Günther Förg (Germany, 1952-2013)
  17. David Salle (US, 1952- )
  18. Carrie Mae Weems (US, 1953- )
  19. Albert Oehlen (Germany, 1954- )
  20. Robert Gober (US, 1954- )
  21. Christopher Wool (US, 1955- )
  22. Zhou Chunya (China, 1955- )
  23. Kerry James Marshall (US, 1955- )
  24. Rudolf Stingel (Italy/US, 1956- )
  25. Andy Goldsworthy (UK: England, 1956- )
  26. George Condo (US, 1957- )
  27. Luc Tuymans (Belgium, 1958- )
  28. Mark Wallinger (UK: England, 1959- )
  29. Grayson Perry (UK: England, 1960- )
  30. Mark Bradford (US, 1961- )
  31. John Currin (US, 1962- )
  32. Sarah Lucas (UK: England, 1962- )
  33. Liu Xiaodong (China, 1963- )
  34. Zeng Fanzhi (China, 1964- )
  35. Liu Wei (China, 1965- )
  36. Matthew Barney (US, 1967- )
  37. Mark Grotjahn (US, 1968- )
  38. Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany/UK, 1968- )
  39. Chris Ofili (UK/Trinidad & Tobago, 1968- )
  40. Cecily Brown (UK: England/US, 1969- )
  41. Jenny Saville (UK: England, 1970- )
  42. Adrian Ghenie (Romania/Germany, 1977- )
  43. Kehinde Wiley (US, 1977- )
  44. Njideka Akunyili Crosby (Nigeria/US, 1983- )

Here is my visual arts checklist: My Checklists – Visual Art

Here are the geographical lists with new items:
North America & South America
Europe
Africa, Asia & Australia