What constitutes power in the art world? Is it wealth, institutional influence, or mastery in deal making? Perhaps it’s something less tangible, like the uncanny ability to sense the next big thing before anyone else. The art world power elite includes the Qatari sheikh who spends freely to build collections of Islamic art treasures, among many other items, as well as the New York museum director who six years ago raised $850 million for one expansion and is now preparing to raise more millions for another. Then there’s the gallery owner who has franchises in 10 cities worldwide and shows no signs of stopping at that. Such global players influence the lives and careers of people around them through their activities.
Each December the editors of Art+ Auction reflect on the events of the year and select the men and women who have had the greatest impact on the art world. Most on the list have done something during the past 12 months that made us take notice. But there are also perennial candidates, who are so integral to the day-to-day machinery of the art world that it’s hard to imagine it functioning without them. They are the tastemakers who make or break reputations and markets.
Working out who controls the art world is not easy, because most powerful people in this business try hard not to appear too powerful. Some shun the spotlight altogether. Museum and other nonprofit professionals never want to talk openly about power, let alone acknowledge its uses; supporting artists, they say, is their primary mission. Such protests betray a certain disingenuousness, of course, because their choices have consequences for artists’ markets.

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Much art world power continues to be concentrated in the U.S., where the market is still strongest in spite of the recession. But shifts are apparent, and nobody really knows what form power will take over the next few years. Europeans have been buying more, mostly in London, while new players have emerged in Brazil, India, and the Middle East. China, including Hong Kong, is also poised to play a much greater role in the market, mirroring its clout in the general global economy. The country now has more than 1,000 billionaires, so the power stakes could be high.
Some people argue that the art world these days is simply too large and heterogeneous to be dominated by any one individual, group, or country. That seems right to us. Power is increasingly dispersed — many who participate in the art world have some degree of control over some aspect of it. The diversity of fields covered in the following pages and the widely varying paths the people on the list have taken to reach their pinnacle reflects this new decentralized reality.
AUCTION POWER
Pierre Berge
Bergé shot to international fame in February 2009 after the record €342.4 million ($443 million) sale held by Christie’s at the Grand Palais, in Paris, of the massive fine- and decorative-arts holdings belonging to him and his longtime partner, Yves Saint Laurent. Since then his astute brand building has helped his Brussels-based auction company, Pierre Bergé & Associés, grab a bigger slice of the auction pie from his competitors.
Alex Carel
After barely four years learning the ropes at Christie’s New York, the 27-year-old contemporary-art specialist and budding rainmaker was promoted to head the firm’s postwar- and contemporary-art department. Noted for reeling in new clients, including the French supercollector Steve Rosenblum, Carel is a rising star in the company.
Francois Curiel
The seasoned jewelry specialist, auctioneer, and former chairman of Christie’s France has taken on a new and even more prestigious role as head of Christie’s Asia, in Hong Kong, the richest and fastest-growing segment of the global auction business. Already a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, the 40-year veteran of the salesroom is still burnishing his seigneurial image.
Lisa Dennison
Few professionals from the museum world make it in the bruising corporate auction environment, but since leaving her post as director of the Guggenheim, in 2007, Dennison has made herself indispensable to Sotheby’s, where she has been instrumental in developing client-oriented one-off exhibitions at the firm’s York Avenue headquarters in Manhattan.
Simon de Pury
The Houdini of the auction world has escaped seemingly impossible financial binds to keep Phillips de Pury & Company not just running but going full bore. De Pury’s latest scene-stealing moment: taking the auction podium for the opening sale of a posh new Park Avenue salesroom in New York.
Brett Gorvy
The international co-head, with the estimable Amy Cappellazzo, of the Christie’s postwar- and contemporary-art department is known for his skill at winning serious consignments, such as the estate of author Michael Crichton, which earned $93.2 million this past May. He has also increased private-sales activity, competing head-to-head with Haunch of Venison gallery, a Christie’s subsidiary.
Guardian & Poly
The top two Chinese auctioneers, both in Beijing, are fighting for dominance in this fast-growing market. The 17-year-old Guardian is Asia’s highest-grossing auction house, with sales last year of $400 million, double the previous year’s total. President and director Wang Yannan, the daughter of the former Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, is one of the most powerful forces in the global auction world. The five-year-old state-owned Poly generated sales of around $230 million last year and takes the prize for most expensive work of Chinese art at auction, a Song-era hand scroll, which it sold for $63.8 million in June.
Tobias Meyer
The worldly-wise head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s and an unrivaled auctioneer, Meyer is also the public face and sound-bite provider for the firm. Some say he wants eventually to run the company, which he joined in 1992.
Greg Rohan
The president of the Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries opened showcases for the firm in New York and Beverly Hills this year. With its huge online presence, Heritage is gunning to expand to other luxury markets.
Cheyenne Westphal
The London-based chairman of contemporary art at Sotheby’s Europe is the firm’s senior specialist in that supercompetitive arena. Articulate and knowledgeable, Westphal is unbeatable in client relations.
Patti Wong
The London and Hong Kong-based chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, one of a vanguard of auction executives plugged in to the fast-developing market in mainland China, received kudos this year following two white-hot seasons of record-breaking sales.
THE POWER OF TRADITION
William Acquavella
Responsible for some of the biggest deals in 19th- and 20th-century art of the past three decades, the New York gallerist this spring purchased Jasper Johns’s 2002 "Study for a Painting," from the Michael Crichton collection, for $5.3 million at Christie’s and reunited works from the famous Scull collection in his East 79th Street town-house gallery.
Jean-Luc Baroni
Representing the third generation in the family business, the Old Masters dealer is known to battle for the best in the salesrooms. This past spring he snagged a pair of Venetian views by Canaletto for $3.9 million at Sotheby’s New York.
Konrad Bernheimer
The Munich and London Old Masters powerhouse is thought to have made the most expensive sale at Maastricht this year, of a Lucas Cranach for €5.3 million ($7.3 million). At Christie’s London in July, he nabbed a Peter Paul Rubens for £9 million ($13.7 million). Bernheimer, ever assured, is unmoved by questions raised about its authorship.
Gisele Croes
The intrepid Belgian dealer in Asian relics is known both for her expertise and her ability to snag seemingly unobtainable treasures, which she continues to unveil, even in a shrinking market.
Richard Green
The London power broker and his two sons rule the roost when it comes to 19th-century art in London, but they have a large stake in the field of Old Masters as well, buying regularly at the auction houses, to which they also offer stiff competition with their large and stellar inventory.
Johnny Van Haeften
The unofficial dean of Maastricht, the London Dutch and Flemish Old Masters mogul has run to ground many a masterpiece, including Isack van Ostade’s 1644 winter landscape, which he purchased at Sotheby’s London this past summer for £1.83 million ($3 million).
Carlton Hobbs
The sale of a 1680 escritorio from Oaxaca, Mexico, to one of the Northeast U.S.’s largest institutions was just one of the deals that the New York antiques heavyweight, in business for 27 years, oversaw this past year.
Daniel Katz
Trade was brisk at the London dealer’s booth in Maastricht, where he sold multiple million-dollar-plus works — including a 17th-century portrait bust of Louis XIV by François Girardon — and bought an 1834 painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot for $2 million from his London competitor Dickinson gallery.
Fabrizio Moretti
On a mission to discover the golden needles in the haystacks of Italian Renaissance art — and succeeding — the Florentine dealer, now in his 12th year of business, with branches in London and New York, is an important member of a new generation in the field of Old Masters.
Benjamin Steinitz
One of the handful of luxe French antiquaires doling out the best boiseries and boulle, Steinitz continues to expand the global reach of the family business, pulling out all the stops for its booths at fairs around the world, from New York and San Francisco to Paris and London.
POWER COLLECTORS
Roman Abramovich
The Moscow-based investor with steel and mining interests regularly adds to his contemporary and modern holdings, occasionally paying record-smashing sums, like $86.3 million for Francis Bacon’s "Triptych," 1976, at Sotheby’s in 2008. Invariably by his side at art fairs is his girlfriend and fellow arts patron, Dasha Zhukova.
Bernard Arnault
With $27.5 billion in personal assets, the LVMH chief was named Europe’s richest man by Forbes this year. He also saw building begin on his long-planned Frank Gehry-designed museum, the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation, in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne.
Alice Cheng
The Hong Kong-based businesswoman, known for her unfailing connoisseur’s eye, has been scooping up imperial treasures at auction, most recently a Qianlong-period vase for which she paid $32.4 million at Sotheby’s. "I knew the price was going to be high, but as long as I like it, it’s worth it," she says, adding, "I like it a lot." One would hope so.
Steven A. Cohen
The Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge-fund manager hit some speed bumps this year, such as barely surpassing the low estimate on the much-hyped Edouard Manet self-portrait he put up for sale at Sotheby’s. The stock owned by his firm, SAC Capital Advisors, however, was valued at $9.7 billion in the second quarter, which makes the $110 million he reportedly dropped on a Jasper Johns "Flag" painting sound like pocket change. (A+A’s own power lawyers, Charles and Thomas Danziger, represented the seller, Jean-Christophe Castelli, on the deal.)
Farhad Farjam
In his exhibition space, the Farjam Collection, in Dubai, where he is a reigning arts patron, the Iranian-born philanthropist displays rotating selections from his comprehensive holdings of Islamic art, ranging from carpets to ceramics to Korans. He also collects modern and contemporary works by cutting-edge Arab talents like Mahmoud Said and Youssef Nabil.
Dakis Joannou
The media uproar over the "Skin Fruit" exhibition of his collection last year at New York’s New Museum, where he is a trustee, has hardly spoiled the Athens-based Joannou’s appetite for acquiring daring art. One of the world’s most important collectors of works by Jeff Koons, he also owns a trove of pieces by Greek artists and is always filling his stores of international contemporary art.
Fatima & Eskandar Maleki
The Iranian-born Fatima has served on the boards of the photo-oriented Prix Pictet and the Tate. She and her husband, Eskandar, a former oil-company executive, can be spotted in the aisles of art fairs from Miami to Dubai and have also made high-profile purchases of pieces by such names as Chris Ofili at auction.
Philip S. Niarchos
With residences in Paris, London, and Saint Moritz, the secretive eldest son of the late shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos is a scrupulous steward of the collection left him by his father, to whose holdings of masterpieces by Picasso and Van Gogh he has added works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Niarchos is whispered to be one of the reasons Gagosian Gallery opened in Paris.
Francois Pinault
The luxury-retail billionaire owns Château Latour, Yves Saint Laurent, and Christie’s, among other prominent brands, but his favorite possessions seem to be his blue-chip collection of artworks by the likes of Takashi Murakami, Sigmar Polke, and Cy Twombly. Pinault snapped up a spectacular spread of Venetian real estate to display it and continues to expand his already vast holdings — rumor has it that he recently visited studios in Beijing.
Lily Safra
She won’t confirm it, but it’s easy to believe reports that it was Safra who spent $103.7 million on Alberto Giacometti’s "Homme qui marche I" at Sotheby’s London in February. According to a juicy biography published this year, the philanthropist and socialite has never denied herself the best that money could buy.
Alice Walton
The Wal-Mart heiress has been steadily acquiring works to fill her Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, currently under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walton scooped up a 1985 Andy Warhol portrait of Dolly Parton for $914,500 at Sotheby’s New York in May and was later spotted at Art Basel.
Anita & Chaim "Poju" Zabludowicz
Over the past decade the Finnish-born London-based billionaire businessman and his wife have earned a rep as forward-looking connoisseurs. Although they collect globally, their philanthropy is local: Anita sits on the Tate’s Foundation Committee, while together they run a private museum, 176, in north London and award the annual 176/Zabludowicz Collection Future Map Prize to an emerging artist. Currently the pair are looking to hire a curator for an exhibition of their collection.
DESIGN POWER
Ron Arad
The designer finally received a retrospective of his wide-ranging career in his adoptive country, at London’s Barbican Gallery, and cut the ribbon on his first completed building in his native one, the Design Museum Holon, in Israel.
Marc Benda
That the director of New York’s Friedman Benda gallery has his finger on the pulse of contemporary design was evident with this spring’s much-buzzed-about show devoted to the Joris Laarman Lab’s bone-shaped furniture.
James Carpenter
The American designer is rescuing the modernist potential of glass in buildings with projects like the renovation and expansion he designed for the Israel Museum (which opened in July) and 7 World Trade Center, whose glass curtain walls create a sort of vitrine for a Jenny Holzer installation in the lobby.
Stephane Custot & Patrick Perrin
The duo’s four-year-old London fair, the Pavilion of Art & Design, scored record sales in October and is "the most intelligently conceived selling show in the Western world," says Art+Auction international editor Souren Melikian. Future editions in New York and Asia are reportedly being considered.
Francois-Joseph Graf
If you were dazzled by a particular booth at this year’s Biennale des Antiquaires, in Paris, chances are it was created by the eclectic Graf, who counts Valentino and Baron David de Rothschild, as well as high-end retailers like Cartier and Galerie J. Kugel, among his clients.
Clemence & Didier Krzentowski
The pair’s discerning eye for design as well as contemporary art sets them apart from other dealers — as does their unparalleled access to prime material. Their Galerie Kreo is a Paris mainstay for brand-new limited editions and midcentury rarities.
Pearl Lam
The flamboyant dealer, collector, and heiress presides over her Shanghai-based Contrasts gallery, promoting everyone from Maarten Baas to Zhang Huan. No one on any continent seems poised to dethrone her as the design world’s preeminent queen of cool.
Jean Nouvel
Between battling for the full height of a MOMA-adjacent luxury tower and planning the new National Museum of Qatar, the French architect found time to design a red-hot summer pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London.
SANAA
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the duo behind the Tokyo firm with the New Museum, in New York; the Glass Pavilion of the Toledo Museum of Art; and the forthcoming Louvre Lens to its credit, bagged this year’s Pritzker Prize. Sejima also directed the 12th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Patrick Seguin
This Paris dealer dominates the lucrative market for designs by Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand. No wonder Larry Gagosian called on Seguin to curate the inaugural show, devoted to Prouvé, in the project room of his new Right Bank outpost.
Peter Zellner
Dealers looking to make an architectural statement in L.A., like Susanne Vielmetter and Matthew Marks, are lining up at Culver City’s Zellnerplus to commission one of the firm’s trademark discreetly raw gallery spaces.
James Zemaitis
Sotheby’s has maintained its lock on the 20th-century design category by shifting its ace department head into a business-development role so he can focus on obtaining material for lucrative sales devoted to Harry Bertoia, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, and contemporary art paired with design.
POWER DEALERS
Guy Bennett
In 2009 Bennett left his position of 12 years as worldwide co-head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s to ply the other side of the trade, as a bidder on behalf of deep-pocketed clients. In May he reportedly secured Alberto Giacometti’s "Grande tête mince" for a European collector in a sale at his former employer for a cool $53.3 million.
Ivor Braka
Sweep any major salesroom and you’re sure to sight this rangy, impeccably tailored Londoner. When he is not trading in Francis Bacons or advising the Fine Art Fund Group, he is pushing up the value of younger talents: Braka paid an artist record £109,250 ($175,000) for a canvas by the Charles Saatchi-anointed painter Ged Quinn at Christie’s London in October.
Massimo de Carlo
Late last year the Milanese veteran opened a London outlet, Carlson, for a roster that includes Maurizio Cattelan, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Carsten Holler. The dealer (who once let Cattelan tape him to a wall) continues to court up-and-comers, like Elad Lassry.
Sadie Coles
Having outgrown her original location after 13 years, Coles — the canny London dealer for Matthew Barney, Ugo Rondinone, and Elizabeth Peyton — opened a second space nearby in October. Her discerning eye was evident in her Frieze art fair booth, chosen best in show.
Larry Gagosian
The sky is the limit for the expansionist dealer. In the past year he doubled his Los Angeles digs and opened his 9th and 10th galleries, in Paris and Geneva; in January he will inaugurate a long-anticipated Hong Kong operation. Gagosian is the exclusive purveyor of Robert Rauschenbergs in those markets, thanks to winning the artist’s coveted estate this fall.
Arne & Marc Glimcher
In September, four months after amicably separating from Wildenstein, its partner of 17 years, the Pace Gallery celebrated its illustrious 50-year past and a future even more promising since it managed to woo the Willem de Kooning estate away from Larry Gagosian. As Glimcher père passes the torch to his son, the gallery is taking on two dynamic new directors, Nicola Vassell and Vita Zaman, and expanding to a fourth space in New York. Word has it that London will soon follow.
Marian Goodman
Rather than scurry to hang out a shingle on every continent, Goodman has held steady in Paris as well as in New York, where this fall she mounted a meaty historical exhibition of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, whose work inaugurated her gallery in the 1970s. With megawatt talents like John Baldessari and Gerhard Richter in her stable, as well as younger luminaries like Julie Mehretu, her beacon is unlikely to dim anytime soon.
Jay Jopling
Holding court in the two London branches of his White Cube gallery, Jopling represents international names like Mark Bradford, but he will always be best known as the champion of the YBAs. In May the dealer sold a $2.6 million formaldehyde tank by Damien Hirst, still the jewel in his crown, to a Taiwanese buyer and is rumored to be eyeing a perch in Hong Kong.
Nicholas Logsdail
Although his son Alex is playing a greater role, Logsdail, who opened Lisson Gallery in London more than 40 years ago, is hardly taking a backseat. Having packed his stable with the likes of Anish Kapoor, Rodney Graham, Robert Mangold, and Julian Opie, he’s staying on the cutting edge with Allora & Calzadilla, who will occupy the U.S. pavilion in Venice next year. His most recent power play netted him representation of Marina Abramovic in Europe.
Victoria Miro
This London stalwart is entering her 26th year with a roster that includes such blue-chip talents as Chris Ofili, Peter Doig, Grayson Perry, and Isaac Julien (who just premiered a film installation at the Hayward Gallery), as well as younger artists like Hernan Bas.
Robert Mnuchin & Dominique Levy
Call it Manifest Destiny: In September, L & M Arts, New York’s secondary-market powerhouse, run by Lévy and former Wall Street wizard Mnuchin, launched a primary-market operation in Los Angeles with a show-stopping display of new sculptures by hometown hero Paul McCarthy.
Emmanuel Perrotin
Some say he’ll have to sweat now that Larry Gagosian has landed in Paris, but Perrotin, who also has a spacious spread in Miami, still has an ace in Takashi Murakami, whose representation is all the more important as the Japanese artist took his star turn at Versailles this fall.
Monika Spruth & Philomene Magers
Powerful individually and even more so since joining forces in 1998, the dynamic duo behind Sprüth Magers recently gave over the store-front of their enormous Berlin gallery to an art-film emporium designed by Rosemarie Trockel and Thea Djordjadze. They still have plenty of space there and at their London branch to show works by Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and up- and-comers like Cyprien Gaillard.
Angela Westwater
The New York Times may have dubbed Sperone Westwater’s new Norman Foster-designed Bowery tower "more toolbox than jewel box," but Westwater and Gian Enzo Sperone’s $20 million project certainly stands apart from its neighbors. Watch the elevator gallery this month for works by Bruce Nauman.
Iwan & Manuela Wirth
Hauser & Wirth nearly upstaged Frieze when its second London branch, a 15,000-square-foot space on Savile Row, launched in October with a show including a giant Louise Bourgeois bronze spider that only Tate’s Turbine Hall could have accommodated as handily. Their sizable empire extends to New York and Zurich, with a roster that features more than 40 brand names, including the estates of Allan Kaprow, Eva Hesse, Lee Lozano, and Jason Rhoades.
David Zwirner
The New York dealer recently purchased — for a reported $8 million — a three-story, 27,000-square-foot building just around the corner from his vast Chelsea headquarters. It should be just the place to show off his inventory of Donald Judds, now that Zwirner represents the late artist’s foundation.
POWER CURATORS
Klaus Biesenbach
The Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator at large and director of its MoMA PS1 affiliate organized a double-barreled blast of shows this year. The enormously successful "Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present," MOMA’s first retrospective devoted to a performance artist, was followed by the well received third edition of "Greater New York" at PS1.
Iwona Blazwick
The director of Whitechapel Gallery, in London, has made good use of its new 41,000 square feet of space, mounting major exhibitions by Rachel Harrison, Alice Neel, and Walid Raad and persuading Greek collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos to loan his Duchamp "Fountain." Blazwick chairs the gallery’s MaxMara Art Prize for Women and sits on the jury for the Jarman Award for experimental filmmaking.
Bice Curiger
From her perch in Switzerland, Curiger casts a long shadow in the international art world as curator of Kunsthaus Zurich, as well as editor in chief and editorial director, respectively, of the art magazines Parkett and Tate Etc. Her appointment as curator of the 2011 Venice Biennale, which she has titled "ILLUMInations," adds to her reach.
Gao Shiming
When the director of the Centre for Visual Culture Research at the prestigious China Art Academy, in Hangzhou, was tapped to co-curate (with Fan Di’an, Li Lei, and Hua Yi) the eighth edition of the Shanghai Biennale, he devoted one of the exhibition’s five sections to Chinese artists and one to a Sino-Indian summit, reflecting the eastward shift in art world power.
Massimiliano Gioni
Given his many roles, one could be forgiven for thinking that "Gioni" is a pseudonym for several people. This year the 36-year-old director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, in Milan, was promoted by New York’s New Museum from director of special exhibitions to associate director and director of exhibitions, while also adding director of the eighth Gwangju Biennale, "10,000 Lives," to his list of titles.
Jens Hoffmann & Adriano Pedrosa
The co-curators of the 12th Istanbul International Biennial, which opens September 2011, have a head start on their partnership: Pedrosa, a São Paulo-based critic and curator, worked with Hoffmann, the director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, in San Francisco, on the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2009, and is on the editorial board of The Exhibitionist: A Journal on Exhibition Making, which Hoffmann launched this past January.
Jessica Morgan
A guiding hand behind the current John Baldessari show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, as well as the forthcoming Gabriel Orozco retrospective at her home institution, Tate Modern, Morgan was recently named the latter’s first Daskalopoulos Curator of International Art, a three-year posting that will allow her to beef up the museum’s contemporary non-Western holdings. Come 2012 she will have the run of the Tate’s Turbine Hall as curator of the Unilever Series of commissions.
Lars Nittve
With a résumé that includes the directorships of both the Moderna Museet, in Sweden, and Tate Modern, Nittve may have landed his biggest gig yet as the director of M+, a new modern- and contemporary-art museum that will anchor a major Chinese government effort to establish a West Kowloon cultural district when it opens in 2015 in Hong Kong.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
In 2010 the international art scene’s ubiquitous tastemaker organized shows by Wolfgang Tillmans, Christian Boltanski, Klara Liden, and Philippe Parreno at London’s Serpentine Gallery, where he is co-director of exhibitions and director of international projects. The second volume of "Interviews," anthologizing his ongoing series of conversations with artists, scientists, and philosophers, was also published this year.
Mari Carmen Ramírez
From Gego to Hélio Oiticica to Lygia Clark, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has led in institutional reappraisals of numerous Latin American artists, thanks to Ramírez, who established the museum’s Latin American art department in 2001 and is today its Wortham curator and director of its research arm, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas. She will mark the department’s 10th anniversary next year with a retrospective of Op Artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, the installation of a monumental work by Jesús Rafael Soto, and the launch of a major online archive devoted to 20th-century Latin American and Latino art.
POWER PATRONS
Eli Broad
Los Angeles’s biggest benefactor recently commissioned Diller Scofidio + Renfro to build a downtown home for his 2,000-plus postwar and contemporary artworks and kicked in an additional $2 million for the University of Michigan museum that will bear his name, bringing his total outlay on the project to $28 million.
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
The Venezuelan-born patron spreads her largesse among educational and cultural institutions to raise the profile of Latin American art. This year her foundation endowed a chair at Hunter College and funded projects at Bard College; the New Museum; the Hirshhorn; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Jack S. Blanton Museum, in Austin. The first Seminario Cisneros on Latin American contemporary art and culture will convene in Caracas in January 2011.
Dimitris Daskalopoulos
A Guggenheim Foundation trustee and member of both the Tate International Council and the New Museum’s Leadership Council, the Greek financier and noted collector recently endowed a new curatorial post in non-Western art at the Tate Modern.
Robert J. Fisher
The new president of SFMOMA’s board is overseeing a major expansion of the museum that will contain the formidable collection of modern and contemporary works that his late father, Gap founder Donald Fisher, bequeathed to its stewardship last year.
Soichiro Fukutake
As much a fan of architecture as of art, the reclusive billionaire chairman of the Benesse Corporation has since 1988 been the driving force behind the museums that dot Japan’s Naoshima Island and its neighbors. The latest — designed by Tadao Ando and opened this past summer — is dedicated to the Korean Minimalist Lee Ufan.
Agnes Gund
This tireless doyenne of New York arts philanthropy — president emerita of MOMA, chair of the board of PS1, and benefactor of El Museo del Barrio — extends her munificence as well to regional institutions like the SITE Santa Fe International Biennial and her hometown Cleveland Art Museum, of which she is a trustee.
The Lee family
Having brought their Leeum museum to fruition in Seoul in 2004, the Samsung dynasts have set their sights on international venues, including New York’s Guggenheim, where they have underwritten a senior curatorship in Asian art and are rumored to have committed $1 million annually to the museum for the next five years.
Lakshmi Mittal
Proving the power of the corporate purse — and the lure of a legacy Olympic monument comparable to the stadium designed by Ai Weiwei for Beijing in 2008 — the CEO of steel giant ArcelorMittal has pledged £16 million ($25.8 million) of his company’s money for the Anish Kapoor-designed Orbit tower in London, site of the 2012 Olympic Games.
Victor Pinchuk
Building on his PinchukArtCentre’s biennial awards for young Ukrainian artists, the steel-pipe billionaire and L.A. MOCA trustee this year announced the $100,000 Future Generation Art Prize for international artists under 35.
Maya & Ramzy Rasamny
Among the sponsors of the current Walid Raad exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, this well-heeled London couple (Ramzy is CEO of Plurimi Capital) is helping to pilot purchases of Middle Eastern art at the British Museum and Tate Modern, where Maya is co-chair of the Middle East North Africa Acquisitions Committee. She has also served as a judge of the Dubai-based Abraaj Capital Art Prize and on the committee for Art Dubai.
Lynda & Stewart Resnick
A $45 million gift from these longtime LACMA patrons (of Fiji Water and POM Wonderful fame) funded the museum’s new exhibition pavilion, designed by Renzo Piano, which opened in October — and have promised to help fill it with a significant portion of their art holdings.
Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed bin Ali al-Thani
The chastened megacollector returned to the radar screen after his 2005 arrest (and later pardon) in Qatar for misuse of public funds to serve as honorary president of the ninth edition of the tribal-art fair Parcours des Mondes in September.
Carlos Slim Helu
The Mexican telecom tycoon is set to inaugurate a gleaming new branch of his Museo Soumaya, whose holdings — 64,000 works and counting — have outgrown the original San Angel digs in Mexico City. The new structure, which will house the largest collection of Rodins outside France, was designed by Fernando Romero (Slim’s son- in-law) and cost an estimated $750 million. Entrance, however, is free.
POWER PLAYERS
Patricia Barbizet
A crucial player in every business move made by François Pinault, who poached her from Renault back in 1989, Barbizet is now CEO of the billionaire collector’s Artémis investment company and a chairman at Christie’s, where she recently steered the search for a new chief executive.
Fan Di’an
The outward-looking director of the National Art Museum of China is the country’s de facto culture minister: Nothing important happens without his blessing, and nothing that happens is important without it. This year he was a co-curator of the eighth Shanghai Biennial while pursuing an expansion of his home institution.
Michael Govan
Since his 2006 appointment as head of the Los Angeles County Art Museum, the former Dia Art Foundation director has emerged as a key player in the city’s booming art scene. This summer, despite whispers of tension with megacollector and LACMA trustee Eli Broad, Govan shepherded the $45 million Resnick Pavilion to completion and coasted to a six-year contract renewal.
Laurence Fraff
Regularly exchanging his diamond- derived millions for pricey contemporary artworks, the London jeweler keeps his eye on younger artists as well as market stars like Andy Warhol. In February he paid $938,000 at Christie’s for a piece by salesroom newcomer Matthew Day Jackson.
Phillip Hoffman
When stocks and bonds tank, art starts to look like a solid investment. Hoffman, a former finance director at Christie’s, has capitalized on the recessionary moment with his 10-year-old Fine Art Fund Group. Preaching the asset class’s long-term value, imperviousness to inflation, and tax efficiency, Hoffman’s London-based firm believes investors should allocate 1 to 5 percent of their portfolios to art and boasts that its funds overall generate an average annualized return of 34 percent.
Marie-Josee Kravis
The Quebec-born economist is not only a member of the Council on Foreign Relations but also happens to be president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art. A perk of the latter post: Museum supporters make acquisitions to recognize your leadership skills. In July, MOMA acquired Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographic series "Winding Towers," 1966-97, in Kravis’s honor.
Glenn D. Lowry
Much of the talk about the Museum of Modern Art director centers on his compensation, which for 2008-09 topped $1.3 million. Lowry earned his keep this year, however, with several strategic moves — among them, mounting a landmark Marina Abramovic retrospective that raised eyebrows with its naked performers but brought the museum critical props.
Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani
There is no shortage of arts activity on the Arabian Peninsula these days, but the 27-year-old chair of the Qatar Museums Authority — the daughter of Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned and His Highness the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani — has distinguished herself with I.M. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art and Jean Nouvel’s National Museum of Qatar (opening 2013).
Alberto Mugrabi
The Mugrabi most likely to be glimpsed on the art world social scene, hanging with pals Aby Rosen and Larry Gagosian, "Tico" controls a big chunk of the secondary market for Warhol and Basquiat as both collector and dealer.
Philippe Segalot
The former Christie’s specialist excels in brash moves and major deals. Ségalot, who runs the private dealership GPS Partners (with Franck Giraud and Lionel Pissarro), consults on his ex-boss François Pinault’s collection, but that didn’t stop him from organizing an $80 million sale to fete the new Park Avenue HQ of Christie’s rival Phillips de Pury & Company this fall.
Nicholas Serota
This year the determined director of Britain’s Tate museums has weathered storms over issues ranging from their links to BP oil money to the health risks posed by Ai Weiwei’s "Sunflower Seeds" installation in the Turbine Hall. Still, as Tate Modern celebrates its 10th year, Serota raised half the $328.6 million needed to fund an extension, begun this spring, intended to better accommodate the museum’s 4.8 million visitors.
Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan
As chairman of both the Tourism Development & Investment Company and the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, Sheikh Tahnoon is the architect of the UAE’s bid to become the next global art hub, spearheading the Saadiyat Island cultural development, future home to the Abu Dhabi branches of such institutions as the Guggenheim and the Louvre.
POWER TO WATCH
Harry Blain & Graham Southern
After Blain and his business partner, Southern, left Haunch of Venison, the gallery they founded in 2002 and sold to Christie’s in 2007, this summer, they launched a new venture: the Blain Southern gallery, in London. They also plan to open a space in Berlin. Blain expanded his secondary-market reach in New York, partnering with the former Sotheby’s specialist Emmanuel Di Donna on a gallery that opened last month.
Richard Chang
Based in New York, the Beijing director of the investment firm Tira Holdings founded the Domus Collection, which contains works by Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst, and Zhang Xiaogang, among others. Last spring he showed selections from it at the private Ullens Centre museum, in the Chinese capital.
Jeffrey Deitch
At his New York gallery, Deitch demonstrated an unerring instinct for finding talent. It remains to be seen whether he can translate that ability into the political acumen necessary to run a major institution. One good sign: In less than a year as director of L.A. MOCA, he has reeled in new trustees to bolster finances after Eli Broad’s $30 million bailout in 2008. Still, Deitch has his work cut out for him in the competition with rival Michael Govan for Hollywood money.
Lisa Freiman
The contemporary curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art cut the ribbon on the IMA’s sculpture park, 100 Acres. And she won the U.S. State Department’s unanimous vote to present the Puerto Rican duo Allora & Calzadilla in the American Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale.
John Maeda
A former MIT media-arts pioneer operating at the intersection of design and technology, the president since 2008 of the Rhode Island School of Design takes an open-source approach to overseeing the famously foundational curriculum, intent on turning out leaders of a 21st-century creative economy.
Victoria Noorthoorn
The Buenos Aires-based independent curator has a record of successes, including projects for the Malba-Fundación Costantini, in the Argentine city, but a real test comes next September, as she takes on her first major international art event, the Lyon Biennale.
Abdullah Al-Turki
The creative director of the two-year-old Edge of Arabia advanced its goal of bringing Saudi Arabian contemporary art to an international audience with a presentation of representative work at the Venice Biennale in 2009. This year he organized an exhibition of 17 Saudi artists that traveled to Art Dubai and the Berlin Biennale and that is now on view in Istanbul.
P.C. Valmorbida
This bicoastal red-carpet regular is determined to prove that his Los Angeles gallery, Prism, which he owns with business partner Jared Najjar, is not just a vanity project. A scion of the Melbourne-based Valmorbida family, which has made some $500 million importing food from its native Italy, P.C. mounted a show of Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki this past spring. His older brother Andy runs the New York private art dealership Valmorbida & Co., which does pop-up shows in L.A., New York, Milan, and other international locations.