Reader's Digest: August 12, 2023

For a bracingly cynical take on Gerhard Richter, often tagged as the pre-eminent visual artist working today, I recommend this piece by Malcolm Bull in the LRB. (By “recommend” I do not mean “endorse”—nor do I mean the opposite.)

When I first [looked at the rankings on Artprice and Artfacts] more than ten years ago, the artist who came out on top, outperforming all other living artists when the rankings were combined, was Gerhard Richter. When I checked again recently, he was still there in pole position, the undisputed World Number One. This is a phenomenal, Djokovic-level achievement…

It is “all the more astonishing,” Bull writes, since since the rankings are often inversely correlated, the first a measure of corporate taste, the second of curatorial esteem: “It’s as if Pollock and Duchamp had formed a partnership to establish market dominance and the company had stayed in business ever since.”

How has Richter managed this extraordinary feat? Reviewing the epic Gerhard Richter: Painti…