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The Best Artists of All Time – Painters and Sculptors

While collecting over 15 lists of “Best Artists of All Time” (this is a list of visual artists, focusing on painters and sculptors – architecture and photography have separate lists), I kept thinking about how many great works of art have no artist’s name attached to them: the cave paintings of Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira; the Venus figurines; the seals of Mohenjo-Daro; the mosaic tiles of Ravenna, the Dome of the Rock, Damascus and Isfahan; the medieval icons of St. Catherine’s Monastery; the relief sculptures of Nineveh, Persepolis, Borobudur, Amaravati, Chartres and Amiens; the giant sculptures of the Olmecs and Rapa Nui; the Nkisi Nkondi nail figures; the Fang Ngil masks; the Codex Borgia; the Book of Kells; the Wilton Diptych, and so many more. When did artists emerge from the shadows of anonymity, and why? Or should we ask instead why so many artists failed to preserve their names for posterity? From what I can gather, the idea of the artist as a creative individual who deserved recognition for his or her creations arose in different cultures at different times. The Ancient Greeks celebrated the genius of Phidias, Praxiteles, Lysippos and Euphronios and the Chinese and Japanese cultures celebrated artists by name as early as the 7th Century CE, but in many other cultures and in many other times, the artist was considered a craftsman who made art the way a chairmaker made a chair or a blacksmith made a horseshoe. When 7th Century Chinese court official Yan Liben became known for his paintings instead of his bureaucratic achievements, he felt humiliated, since painters belonged to a lower rank with tradesman such as tailors and carpenters. Most art historians trace the modern-day acknowledgement of artists in Western Culture to the Renaissance and the rise of humanism, a philosophy that put the individual at the center of the universe, as the driving force of civilization. While some medieval artists had signed their work, it was probably Proto-Renaissance master Giotto di Bondone who was the first in a long line of Western artists, continuing to this day, who took steps to ensure that their names are associated with their art. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, first published in 1550, rejected once and for all the notion that artists were anonymous craftsmen and instead celebrated their individual geniuses, at the same time raising the artist above ordinary citizens and introducing the concept of artist as celebrity. Once an artwork was connected with the name of an artist, certain consequences ensued: first, works by the better (or better known) artists increased in value; second, lesser known artists seeking to cash in on the work of more famous artists began creating cheap imitations and outright forgeries; and third, the famous artists, in response, sought to protect their work by various means – first, merely by signing them – but this impulse eventually led to today’s copyright laws. The reason Michelangelo signed the Pietà was that someone was going around telling people that the sculpture had been carved by his rival, Cristoforo Solari. Anonymity was one thing, but the greatest artist of all time (see list below) could not bear the idea that another, lesser artist, was getting the credit for his masterpiece.

15 “Best Artists” Lists
Michelangelo (1475-1564) Italian painter, sculptor, architect

14 Lists
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Italian painter, sculptor, architect

11
Rembrandt (1606-69) Dutch painter, printmaker
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Spanish painter, sculptor

10
Raphael (1483-1520) Italian painter
Titian (1488-1576) Italian painter
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French painter

8
Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) Dutch painter
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) French painter

7
Jan van Eyck (1390-1441) Flemish painter
Caravaggio (1573-1610) Italian painter
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) Flemish painter
Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) Spanish painter
J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) British painter
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) French painter
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) Dutch painter

6
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1528-1569) Flemish painter
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) French painter
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) French painter
Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) Italian painter, sculptor
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) Swiss sculptor, painter
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) Spanish painter, sculptor

5
Giotto (c. 1267-1337) Italian painter
Donatello (1386-1466) Italian sculptor
El Greco (1541-1614) Greek-Spanish painter
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) French painter
Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) Spanish painter, printmaker
John Constable (1776-1837) British painter
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) French painter
Édouard Manet (1832-1883) French painter
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) French sculptor
James McNeill Whistler (1856-1921) American painter
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) Russian painter
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) American painter
René Magritte (1898–1967) Belgian painter
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) American painter

4
Rogier van der Weyden (1399-1464) Flemish painter
Tomasso Masaccio (1401-1428) Italian painter
Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) Italian painter
Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) Dutch painter
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) German painter, printmaker
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) German painter, printmaker
Frans Hals (c.1580-1666) Flemish-Dutch painter
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) French painter
William Blake (1757-1827) British painter, printmaker
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) Japanese painter, printmaker
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) French painter
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) French painter
Georges Seurat (1859-1891) French painter
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) Austrian painter
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) American painter, printmaker

3
Yan Liben (c. 600-673) Chinese painter
Cimabue (c.1240-1302) Italian painter
Duccio (c.1255/60–1318/19) Italian painter
Huang Gongwang (1269-1354) Chinese painter
Simone Martini (1284-1344) Italian painter
Fra Angelico (1387-1455) Italian painter
Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) Italian painter
Piero della Francesca (1416-1492) Italian painter
Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) Italian painter
Tintoretto (1518-1594) Italian painter
Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) French painter
William Hogarth (1697-1764) British painter, printmaker
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) French painter
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) French painter
Kitagawa Utamaro (c. 1753-1806) Japanese painter, printmaker
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) French painter, printmaker
Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) Japanese painter, printmaker
Winslow Homer (1836-1910) American painter
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) French painter
Piet Mondrian (1872 -1944) Dutch painter
Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) Russian painter
Paul Klee (1879-1940) Swiss painter
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter, sculptor
Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986) American painter
Egon Schiele (1890-1918) Austrian painter
Joan Miró (1893-1983) Spanish painter
Henry Moore (1898-1986) British sculptor
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) Mexican painter

2
Fan Kuan (fl. 990-1020) Chinese painter
Guo Xi (c. 1020-1090) Chinese painter
Ma Yuan (c. 1160-1225) Chinese painter
Jokei (fl. 1190-1200) Japanese sculptor
Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290-1348) Italian painter
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516) Italian painter
Matthias Grünewald (1470-1528) German painter
Giorgione (1478-1510) Italian painter
Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) Italian painter
Georges de la Tour (1593-1652) French painter
Artemisia Gentileschi (1597-1654) Italian painter
Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) Spanish painter
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) Italian sculptor, painter, architect
François Boucher (1703-1770) French painter
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) British painter
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) German painter
Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) French painter
John Everett Millais (1829-1896) British painter
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) Danish-French painter
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) French painter
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) American painter
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) Norwegian painter, printmaker
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) French painter
Constantin Brâncusi (1876-1957) Romanian-French sculptor
Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) Italian painter, sculptor
Georges Braque (1882-1963) French painter, sculptor, printmaker
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) Belarussian-French painter
Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) Italian-Greek painter
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) American sculptor
Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) Russian-American sculptor
Mark Rothko (1903-1970) Russian-American painter
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) Dutch-American painter, sculptor
Arshille Gorky (1904-1948) Armenian-American painter
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1977) American painter
David Hockney (1937- ) British painter
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) American painter

Today Is the First Frame of the Rest of Your Life: The Art Lists Redux

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The folks at WordPress (hosts of this blog) tell me that of all the posts on Make Lists, Not War, those with the most views (by far!) are the lists of the Best Works of Art of All Time. These pages receive more clicks than the rest of my blog entries combined. For that reason, I decided to revise and expand my Best Works of Art pages. Although I have no background in art or art history, thanks to Wikipedia, the websites of the world’s museums, the folks at Khan Academy, and various other sources, I have been able to teach myself a little something about the works of art and synthesize what I’ve learned into mini-essays to accompany many of the items on the Best Art lists. It is now time to unveil Version 2.0 of the Best Works of Art and Art History 101 lists.

Just to give you a taste of what we’re talking about, I’ve provided the very top paintings and sculptures of all time below. This ranking is based on a meta-list that combines 18 separate lists of the top, best, greatest, most important or most highly regarded works of art, as determined by art critics, art historians and art experts of all stripes. At the bottom of the page, you’ll find links to my new, improved Best Works of Art lists.

THE TOP 15 PAINTINGS OF ALL TIME

1. Giotto di Bondone: Frescoes, Scrovegni Chapel (Arena Chapel) (c. 1305-1308)

2. Matthias Grünewald: The Isenheim Altarpiece (1509-1515)

3. Francisco Goya: The Third of May, 1808 (1814)

4. Pablo Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

5. El Greco: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586)

6. Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas (1656)

7. Tommaso Masaccio: Frescoes, Brancacci Chapel (1424-1428)

8. Hieronymous Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1510)

9. Leonardo da Vinci: Mona Lisa (1503-1505)

10. Michelangelo Buonarroti: Frescoes, Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1508-1512)

11. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Hunters in the Snow (1565)

12. Théodore Géricault: The Raft of the Medusa (1819)

13. Vincent Van Gogh: The Starry Night (1889)

14. Grant Wood: American Gothic (1930)

15. Pablo Picasso: Guernica (1937)

TOP 14 SCULPTURES OF ALL TIME

1. Michelangelo Buonarroti: David (1501-1504)

2. Thutmose (attrib.): Bust of Queen Nefertiti (1345 BCE)

3. Unknown Artist: The Terracotta Army, Tomb of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang (246-208 BCE)

4. Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-1652)

5. Michelangelo Buonarroti: Pietà (1497-1499)

6. Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty (1970)

7. Unknown Artist: Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun (1333-1323 BCE)

8. Myron: The Discus Thrower (460-450 BCE)

9. Phidias (?): The Parthenon Frieze (c. 443-438 BCE)

10. Unknown Artist: The Pergamon Altar Frieze (c. 180 BCE)

11. Alexandros of Antioch: Venus de Milo (130-100 BCE)

12. Agesander, Athenodoros & Polydorus: Laocoön and His Sons (c. 150-50 BCE)

13. Donatello: David (c. 1435-1440)

14. Auguste Rodin: The Kiss (1889)

Here are the Best Works of Art on three or more of the 18 lists, organized by the number of lists that the artwork was on. For example, Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes were the only works of art to be included on 13 of the 18 lists.

Best Works of Art of All Time – The Critics’ Picks, Part 1
(works of art on 5 to 13 of the original 18 lists)
Best Works of Art of All Time – The Critics’ Picks, Part 2
(works of art on 3 or 4 of the original 18 lists)

Here are the best works of art on 2 or more of the 18 lists, organized chronologically. (I haven’t gotten around to writing essays for the artworks that were only one two lists, but it will happen.)

Art History 101 – Part I: Prehistoric Era – 1399 CE
Art History 101 – Part II: 1400-1599
Art History 101 – Part III: 1600-1799
Art History 101 – Part IV: 1800-Present

Getting In On The Act: Introducing The Acting Lists

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What makes a great acting performance? Some would say, “You can’t tell he’s acting” or “She vanishes into the character.” For some of us, it is easier to pick out the bad performances: wooden, uninspired line delivery, a lack of realistic interactions with other characters and reactions to events that don’t seem credible. The ‘ham’ makes it obvious to all that he is ACTING, thus making it impossible for us to suspend our disbelief and accept the film or play as real (at least on an emotional level). Of course the actor may not be wholly responsible for a ‘bad’ performance. Except in a wholly-improvised situation, there is a writer who created the character and wrote all or most of his lines. It takes an especially gifted actor to give a three-dimensional performance of a two-dimensional character. To confuse matters further, writers may deliberately draw attention to the artificial nature of the play or film – think of Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill on the stage and Jean-Luc Godard in film (or Groucho’s frequent asides to the audience). Or a writer may deliberately create a character who is acting in their own life (Tennessee Williams was famous for this). I have occasionally reevaluated an acting performance halfway through a movie when I realized that it wasn’t the actor who was disconnected, awkward and seemingly out of place, it was the character.

The Hollywood star system added another layer of complication. During the Golden Age of the studio system (roughly 1920-1960), actors who had become stars had their movie roles carefully selected. The studios felt that in order to preserve the box office appeal of their stars, they had to play roles that fell within a fairly narrow range. Furthermore, for the leading men and ladies, they were not supposed to “disappear” into their roles a la Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis, but to inhabit them while also continuing to project their star persona. In a classic example, the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) was altered to avoid giving the impression that Cary Grant’s character had murdered his wife. In today’s post-studio system, the audience plays a similar role by refusing to accept its stars in roles that clash with their personae. When comic actor Bill Murray attempted to move into serious roles with 1984’s The Razor’s Edge, the audiences stayed away in droves. It took another 20 years for Murray to achieve success in the tragicomic roles which he now excels at.

Even in contemporary performances, there may be a wide variety of acting styles, from The Method to a more instinctive approach. There may be a variety of opinions from observers as well – an unscientific review of Internet postings reveals Daniel Day-Lewis as everything from an overacting ham to the greatest actor alive today. And then in the case of film, there are the “performances” of the director, editor, cinematographer and others who take the actor’s performance, chop it into bits and rearrange them, decide on long shots or close ups, add music to manipulate our emotions, etc. So, while we can do better than “I know it when I see it” in evaluating good and bad acting, finding a list of objective criteria that applies generally appears unrealistic.

Before introducing my new lists of the best film actors of all time, I need to talk about procedure. First, as always, I was limited by the lists I could find in books and on the Internet. These were almost exclusively limited to film actors, so I left out actors who exclusively performed on the stage (no room, then, for Sarah Bernhardt, Lunt and Fontanne, and my favorite stage actor, Mark Waldstein). As for the lists of film actors, there were more lists of men than of women, more contemporary actors than actors from the past, and, as usual, a pro-US and English-language bias. I did my best to find lists that included actors from all over the world, but there were few such sites (at least in English). Knowing that India’s film industry is one of the largest in the world, I went out of my way to find lists of Bollywood actors and include the best-regarded names, even though my knowledge of Bollywood films is essentially zero. As a result, the lists include only the very best known actors from India and non-English speaking countries, while they include some English-language actors whom I do not personally feel merit a place on a “Best Actors” list (I’ll let you decide which ones I’m talking about). While my original intent was to use only lists of “best” actors, I did include some lists of “most popular” and “most famous.” I also included several lists of “best performances” in an attempt to get away from the famous/popular bias. I did draw the line at lists titled “Hottest” or “Sexiest” or “Most Beautiful/Handsome” actors, which I refused to include on principle. Despite all the procedural drawbacks, the resulting list has a lot going for it – I’ve arranged the actors in rank order, and divided it up into two pieces: the first starts with the actors on 22 lists and ends with those on 4 lists. Part 2 includes all the actors on 3 lists. For each actor, I’ve included some biographical information, a selected filmography and a still from one if the films (click on it to enlarge the picture).

So here they are:

Best Film Actors & Actresses of All Time, Part 1
Best Film Actors & Actresses of All Time, Part 2

What’s Up? Docs.

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The documentary film has been around as long as the movies. When the Lumière brothers filmed their workers leaving the factory at the end of the day in 1895, that was a documentary: a depiction of real people engaged in non-fictional activities.

When the Lumières filmed a train arriving at a station, that, too, was a documentary – it was a real train and a real station with no script or actors – but there was a twist: they filmed the train at such an angle that it looked like it was going to crash through the screen and into the theater, causing some to run, according to some accounts, or at least jump in their seats.

The documentary, or non-fiction film, then, often creates the illusion of giving us a glimpse of the truth, of real life, but the Lumières showed that choosing the perspective (literally or figuratively) for presenting the subject involves conscious or unconscious choices on the part of the filmmakers. We easily identify Triumph of the Will as Nazi propaganda, but propaganda comes in many forms. When propaganda happens to promote a viewpoint that you already agree with, it just seems like common sense. And maybe it is. Politically-charged documentaries like those of Michael Moore (Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11) and Charles Ferguson (No End in Sight; Inside Job) lead some to cry foul, while others (myself included) find them rousing indictments of a corrupt system. But one important role of the viewer is to separate facts from opinion and understand that the emotional impact of powerful images can cause us to leave our rational minds behind us.

The techniques of documentary filmmakers are myriad. Some take found footage created by others for other purposes (newsreels, home movies) and fashion them into contemporary accounts of personal lives or historical events. Alain Resnais shaped World War military films into a haunting memorial of the Holocaust in Night and Fog. Some interview participants or others with a personal connection to the facts and present their subjects as ‘talking heads’ (e.g., Errol Morris’s The Fog of War.) Others, as in One Day in September, The Thin Blue Line or Touching the Void, recreate events using techniques ranging from low to high tech. Nature documentaries like Planet Earth, Winged Migration and Microcosmos involve dozens of technicians working all around the globe using the most sophisticated equipment. Personal essay films like Tarnation require only a camcorder and a computer with a movie-making program – plus a willingness to bare your soul and expose all your family members’ deepest flaws. Many documentaries follow some sort of narrative – often chronological – while some, like Man with a Movie Camera, are free-form or even surreal in their structure and imagery. Cinéma vérité filmmakers like the Maysles brothers (Grey Gardens), D.A. Pennebaker (Dont Look Back) and Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies) reject traditional documentary formats, eschewing narration and explanatory titles in an attempt to present reality, unadorned and unjudged, for the viewer to interpret. Other documentarists (e.g., Werner Herzog in Encounters at the End of the World), insert themselves consciously into their films to emphasize the subjectivity of the creative process. Essay films like Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, where a fictional narrator reads letters from a fictional traveler while we watch documentary images, blur the line between fiction and non-fiction. Of course, many documentaries combine several of these techniques.

The goal of the documentary filmmaker may be to inform, to educate, to challenge, to expose evil, lies and hypocrisy, to speak truth to power, to amuse and entertain, to celebrate, to warn, to question, to present the artist’s personal creative vision. Rarely do the best documentaries simply document reality. The conscious and unconscious choices of these filmmakers inevitably shape that reality, creating art in the process.

Here, then, are my documentary lists:

BEST DOCUMENTARIES OF ALL TIME – THE CRITICS’ PICKS
BEST DOCUMENTARIES OF ALL TIME – CHRONOLOGICAL

It’s the Most Wonderful Time – For Listers

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The month of December is high season for listers and those who love lists. Because December is the time that arts critics in every newspaper, magazine, website, blog, TV or radio station look back over the past year and make lists (usually Top Ten lists, but not always) of the best accomplishments from the past 12 months. I’ve been collecting these lists – specifically for films, music and books – since 2002, and collating them to find out which items are on the most lists, and then making my own meta-lists. Why do I do this? One (somewhat inexplicable) reason is that I enjoy the process. But a better reason is that I believe it exposes me to the best of these three arts. Each list becomes a set of recommendations that I trust and that pushes me beyond my comfort zone. I know that some folks don’t trust critics and reviewers to guide their choices of what to see, what to read and what to listen to, but to me the critics’ lists are the best option available, given that you can’t read/watch/listen to everything and must make choices.

What are the other options for choosing what movies to see, books to read, music to listen to: (1) recommendations of friends and family; (2) following one particular expert, critic or reviewer; (3) critics’ reviews in newspapers, magazines and websites, or on radio or TV; (4) recommendations of people who sell movies or CDs or books, like Amazon; (5) trailers or other types of ads; (6) crowd-sourced websites like Goodreads or reviews on Amazon or other sites by ‘regular people’; or (7) meta-data sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes that collect critics’ reviews and assign ratings. I have tried most of these methods myself, and I find that – except for (7), which is very similar to what I do – they all leave me disappointed. I end up feeling like I have either adopted someone else’s tastes; sold out to The Man; ended up in a solipsistic spiral of stuff I know already, or that I’m just being exposed to the winners of various popularity contests judged by people completely unlike me who can’t spell and seem to base their opinions on completely irrational criteria. So instead I rely on the critics and reviewers – people who analyze works of art for a living and may know more than I do about their subject. While I may not agree with the tastes and judgment of each one, there is a pretty good chance that if several of them (or 10, 20 or 30 of them!) agree that a book is worth reading, a film is worth seeing, or an album is worth listening to, they are right. Plus, when you pool the lists of many critics, you get a much wider variety than under most of the other available methods. Taking this approach has led me to find masterpieces of artistic expression – from low to highbrow – that I would never have found had I just listened to what my friends’ recommended. And while the critics’ top ten isn’t always my top ten, I have never regretted a choice I’ve made based on these lists. (Even in the rare case that I don’t ‘like’ a highly rated book, recording or movie, I can appreciate the artistic qualities that led to its high rating and thus I benefit from it. I just won’t be watching/reading/listening to it again any time soon.)

Here are the 2013 lists and Happy New Year:

Best Films of 2013
Best Books of 2013
Best Music of 2013

Make ’em Laugh: The Best Stand-Up Comics of All Time

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I haven’t researched it, but my guess is that stand-up comedy has been around as long as humans have lived in groups. Sitting around the fire in the cave, one person would say, “Those Neanderthals are so dumb…” and the rest would respond (in unison), “How dumb are they?” I can imagine a comedian regaling a crowd in the ancient city of Babylon: “You know, after Nebuchadnezzar’s latest round of executions, the hanging gardens are really the hanging gardens, if you know what I mean.” Entertainment venues across time and all over the world have sponsored comedians as part of their repertoire, but for me the world of stand-up comedy came first through the magic of television. The Ed Sullivan Show. The Tonight Show. SNL. Letterman. HBO. Comedy Central. Now I usually find new stand-ups through YouTube. I’ve also been fortunate enough to see some great live comedy – I’ll never forget my first time at Catch A Rising Star in New York City in the 1970s, with Richard Belzer as the emcee. (Then again, I have also been subjected to racist, misogynist, homophobic ‘humor’ at comedy clubs.) Then there were the few times I shelled out the big bucks to see big name headliners – Steve Martin (in his arrow-through-the-head days), Larry Miller (at Cambridge’s Catch a Rising Star), and Jerry Seinfeld (with a then-unknown Louis C.K. as opener) – and was not disappointed. (Recent fave: two live shows at the Wilbur Theater in Boston seeing the incomparable Maria Bamford!)

All of this is prologue for my latest list – Best Stand-Up Comics of All Time. I collected 12 lists of “Best Stand-Up Comedians” off the Internet and combined them into one list. Here are the results, ranked with the most-listed comics first. The numbers in bold indicate the number of lists the comedian is on. Comics who are on the same number of lists are organized by date of birth. This list contains all the comics who were on at least three of the 12 original source lists. I was a little surprised at the results – most of the comedians are American men. I can understand that there might not be a lot of comedic crossover between cultures, but there have been many funny women over the years, so that was a disappointment. None of my current crop of favorites made it: Maria Bamford, Jim Gaffigan, Brian Regan, Mike Birbiglia – too new, I suppose. Still, the results cover a lot of time periods, comedic styles and personalities – take a look to see if your favorites are there.

9
George Carlin (1937-2008)
Richard Pryor (1940-2005)
Steve Martin (1945- )
Eddie Murphy (1961- )

8
Bill Cosby (1937- )
Jerry Seinfeld (1954- )
Chris Rock (1965- )

7
Rodney Dangerfield (1921-2004)
Lenny Bruce (1925-1966)
Robin Williams (1951-2014)
Bill Hicks (1961-1994)

6
Louis C.K. (1967- )
Dave Chappelle (1973- )

5
Redd Foxx (1922-1991)
Don Rickles (1926- )
Bob Newhart (1929- )
Woody Allen (1935- )
Lewis Black (1948- )
Steven Wright (1955- )

4
Jack Benny (1894-1974)
Bob Hope (1903-2003)
Milton Berle (1908-2002)
Johnny Carson (1925-2005)
Sam Kinison (1953-1992)
Denis Leary (1957- )
Ray Romano (1957- )
Paula Poundstone (1959- )
Eddie Izzard (1962- )
Jim Carrey (1962- )

3
George Burns (1896-1996)
Henny Youngman (1906-1998)
Phyllis Diller (1917-2012)
Joey Bishop (1918-2007)
Buddy Hackett (1924-2003)
Jonathan Winters (1925-2013)
Alan King (1927-2004)
Mort Sahl (1927- )
Jackie Mason (1931- )
Flip Wilson (1933-1998)
David Brenner (1936- )
Billy Connolly (1942- )
Richard Belzer (1944- )
Dick Gregory (1946- )
Richard Lewis (1947- )
David Letterman (1947- )
Billy Crystal (1948- )
Andy Kaufman (1949-1984)
Garry Shandling (1949-)
Jay Leno (1950- )
George Wallace (1952- )
Dennis Miller (1953- )
Tim Allen (1953- )
Larry Miller (1953- )
Freddie Prinze (1954-1977)
Gilbert Gottfried (1955- )
Dana Carvey (1955- )
Sandra Bernhard (1955- )
Bill Maher (1956- )
Richard Jeni (1957-2007)
Albert Brooks (1957- )
Ellen DeGeneres (1958- )
Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay (1958- )
Damon Wayans (1960- )
Jon Stewart (1962- )
D.L. Hughley (1963- )
David Cross (1964- )
Martin Lawrence (1965- )
Adam Sandler (1966- )
Mitch Hedberg (1968-2005)

More Lists About Buildings and Food (Actually, Just Buildings)

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When I was compiling the “Best Works of Art” lists a few weeks ago, I noticed every once in a while that there would be a building on someone’s list. I was focused on painting and sculpture, so I mostly ignored these references to architecture. Until now.

In some ways, architecture is the crowning achievement of the visual arts, in that it incorporates aspects of painting and sculpture, but within the overall context of designed structure in space, so I decided that architecture needed some lists of its own. As I collected over 20 lists of “Best Buildings” and “Best Architecture”, I found that most of the items on the lists met my common sense notion of architecture: Buildings that people use to live, work, play, worship and learn in. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that the scope of architecture went beyond my original conception. The first obvious exception was bridges – you don’t normally go inside them, like buildings – you travel over them. Yet bridges like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate and the Millau Viaduct are some of the most spectacular architectural achievements of the modern era. But the listers also included the Statue of Liberty and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, which I thought of as giant sculptures (in fact, the Statue of Liberty is on my paintings and sculptures list). At least those two items meet my first definition because they are hollow and people can go inside them.

So I revised my working definition of architecture to: Man-made structures that people can go inside, underneath or on top of. But I saw an immediate problem: this definition was too broad: it would make roads, patios, empty refrigerator boxes and even cruise ships and automobiles into architecture. Even more perplexing were two items that turned up on multiple “Best Architecture” lists that didn’t seem to fit any reasonable definition I could come up with: the Great Sphinx of Giza and the giant statues (called “moai”) of Easter Island. You can’t go inside them (unlike the nearby pyramids, for example); you can’t go underneath them and, unlike bridges, they are not designed for people to travel over them.

So I turned to my Internet resources. The online Free Dictionary defines architecture, in part, as: (1) The art and science of designing and erecting buildings; (2) Buildings and other large structures. The first definition is problematic because it excludes not only the Sphinx and the Moai, but also bridges, which are not normally thought of as buildings. But the second definition, while simple, seems to do the trick, especially when we recognize that the word ‘structure’ is related to ‘construct’, which implies a controlling mind and would exclude natural arches or rock formations. One hitch: my new working definition of architecture would include large structures made by animals (non-human animals) – giant termite mounds, for example – but that’s a list for another day.

Here they are,, the new “Best Architecture” lists – with lots of pictures:

Best Architecture of All Time – The Critics’ Picks (in rank order – best buildings first)
Best Architecture of All Time – Chronological (from Stonehenge 2000 BCE to Dubai 2010)

Too Big to Fail: The Best of 2008

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A global financial crisis in the middle of a U.S. presidential election toppled financial institutions and triggered government bail-outs. In the midst of it all, Americans elected their first African-American President, Barack Obama. In other news, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan and the Olympics were held in Beijing. Take a trip back to 2008 – the year that was too big to fail. I’ve compiled lists of the best films, music and books of 2008, according to the critics and bloggers who make those “Best of the Year” lists every December.

Best Films of 2008
Best Books of 2008
Best Music of 2008

Not Averse to Verse – The Best Poetry Ever

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I’ve compiled a new list – The Best Poetry of All Time – The Critics’ Picks. It includes the best poems by dozens (hundreds? I didn’t count) of poets, both named and anonymous. I organized it by poet, chronologically by date of birth. Because that seemed like the thing to do.

To give you a sampling of what’s in store when you peruse the list, I’ve created two mini-lists from it: Best Epic Poems and Best Lyric Poems. The numbers in bold indicate how many of the original lists the poem was on.

BEST EPIC POEMS
Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000-1200 BCE) – Anonymous
The Iliad (c. 750-650 BCE) – Homer
The Odyssey (c. 750-650 BCE) – Homer
The Aeneid (29-19 BCE) – Virgil
Ramayana (c. 500 BCE – 100 CE) – Valmiki (attrib.)
Mahabarata (c. 800 BCE – 300 CE) – Vyasa (attrib.)
The Book of Kings (Shanameh) (1010) – Ferdowsi
Beowulf (c. 700-1025) – Anonymous
The Divine Comedy (1265-1321) – Dante Alighieri
The Canterbury Tales (1343-1400) – Geoffrey Chaucer
Paradise Lost (1667) – John Milton

BEST LYRIC POEMS

10
The Tyger (1794) – William Blake

9
My Love is Like A Red, Red Rose (1794) – Robert Burns
A Noiseless Patient Spider (1882) – Walt Whitman
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (1951) – Dylan Thomas

8
A Poison Tree (1794) – William Blake
Ozymandias (1818) – Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Canti (1835) – Giacomo Leopardi
O Captain! My Captain! (1865) – Walt Whitman
Dover Beach (1867) – Matthew Arnold
Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923) – Robert Frost

7
Holy Sonnet 10: “Death Be Not Proud” (1609) – John Donne
Jerusalem (1804-1810) – William Blake
The Raven (1845) – Edgar Allan Poe
When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer (1867) – Walt Whitman
I Hear America Singing (1867) – Walt Whitman
‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers (c. 1850-1886) – Emily Dickinson
The Road Not Taken (1916) – Robert Frost
The Waste Land (1922) – T.S. Eliot

6
Daffodils (I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud) (1807) – William Wordsworth
How Do I Love Thee? (1845) – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Jabberwocky (1871) – Lewis Carroll
The Listeners (1912) – Walter de la Mare
When You Are Old (1892) – William Butler Yeats
The Darkling Thrush (1901) – Thomas Hardy
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) – T.S. Eliot
Dulce et Decorum Est (1917) – Wilfred Owen

5
Sonnet 18 “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” (1609) – William Shakespeare
Sonnet 30 “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” (1609) – William Shakespeare
Sonnet 65 “Since neither brass nor stone” (1609) – William Shakespeare
Sonnet 73 “That Time of year thou mayst in me behold” (1609) – William Shakespeare
To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough (1785) – Robert Burns
The Garden Of Love (1794) – William Blake
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798) – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
She Walks In Beauty (1814) – Lord Byron
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) – John Keats
Ode on Melancholy (1819) – John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale (1819) – John Keats
Two in the Campagna (1855) – Robert Browning
Remember (1862) – Christina Rossetti
Because I could not stop for death (c. 1850-1886) – Emily Dickinson
Anthem For Doomed Youth (1917) – Wilfred Owen
The Bridge (1930) – Hart Crane
Lullaby (1940) – W.H. Auden
Death Fugue (1948) – Paul Celan
We Real Cool (1959) – Gwendolyn Brooks
Those Winter Sundays (1962) – Robert Hayden
Daddy (1962) – Sylvia Plath
The Cantos (1917-1969) – Ezra Pound

Since this original post, I have arranged the poetry list in chronological order: Best Poems of All Time – Chronological.

Authors and Auteurs: The Individual As Creative Force

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There appears to be a human impulse to attribute a work of art to a single creator. Maybe this is a consequence of the monotheistic religions that so many humans embrace (or perhaps monotheism is a result of the same human impulse). We honor and celebrate the skill and imagination, the creative power of book authors, playwrights, poets, painters, sculptors, songwriters, musicians, and film directors. The underlying theory, I suppose, is that it takes the creative vision of a single mind to produce a fully-realized work of art. The most controversial application of this theory is the auteur theory developed by French film critics in the 1950s and championed in the U.S. by Andrew Sarris. According to the theory, a film’s director is its author, in the same way that the single person who writes a book is its author. The trouble with the theory is that movies are also a collaborative art – an enterprise involving the coordinated artistic and technical skills of many individuals in addition to the director, such as the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the editor, the sound crew, the set designer, costumers, as well as the actors. The auteur critics used their theory to champion lesser-known directors like Samuel Fuller and Douglas Sirk by showing how they used the relative obscurity of genre and “B” movies to put forth a personal artistic vision. But the theory works less well for many of the films produced by the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s, when the director may have been just another cog in the machine. Gone With the Wind seems more a product of its producer, David O. Selznick’s vision, than than of its director, Victor Fleming.

Music can also be a collaborative art, especially in the ensembles of rock and jazz, where songwriting and performing are often spread among a number of talented individuals, working together but also taking opportunities to “solo” and improvise, temporarily elevating the individual above the ensemble. Even classical music, in which the composer’s manuscript is usually sacred, conductors and musicians “interpret” the piece, bringing something of their own style and personality to the final performance.

Painting and sculpture, which are now seen as extremely individualistic, were not always so (and, for massive public art projects, are not so even now). A painter or sculptor in the Renaissance, for example, had many assistants, who often executed some of the work. Painters were even known to charge higher rates depending on the percentage of the work they did themselves. Furthermore, those clients commissioning paintings and sculptures often had very specific requirements about the content of the work. The notion of a painter sitting down to a blank canvas and painting whatever he or she pleased is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Are book authors (and poets and playwrights), then, the only true auteurs? In many cases, the author sits down, writes his or her book alone and then sees it published in substantially the same form. But in other cases, this image ignores the reality of publishers and editors who influence not just the subject of books but the style. (Thomas Wolfe is one famous example of a writer who delivered a mass of disorganized writing to his editor, who then whipped it into shape. Yet the editor is not considered a co-author.) There are also ‘authors’, like Homer and those to whom many ancient manuscripts are attributed, who are merely symbols for the centuries of oral tradition that led to the Iliad, the Odyssey and other works handed down over time. And all artists are influenced by other artists – some steal directly, others unconsciously. Some are rebels; some are reformers, and some wish to return to times gone by. They are influenced by the market – what will sell, what will not. The political climate affects them as well as their personal circumstances.

I have raised all these complications as a preface to introducing a number of new lists. Actually, they are mostly reworkings of older lists (although a few of them dig deeper than the lists I’ve already published). These new lists all have one thing in common: they are organized by artist (as in performer, author, director). Some are alphabetical; some are chronological. The main idea is to see the lists in a different way: through the lens of the individual creator and their body of work. They are particularly useful in answering the question: “Which one should I try first?” (E.g., Which David Bowie or Charles Mingus album? Which Titian painting? Which Dickens book? Which Godard film?) Or, for those who have dabbled already, “Which should I try next?”

Rock, pop, R&B, etc.: Musicians and Their Best Albums
Jazz: Jazz Artists and their Best Recordings
Books: Great Authors and their Masterworks, Part 1: 850 BCE – 1870
Books: Great Authors and their Masterworks, Part 2: 1871-Present
Film: Film Directors and their Best Films
Visual Arts: Great Artists and Their Masterpieces

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