The Most Influential Artists of the Last Decade

In 2013, being what we call an artist is so nebulous a concept the practice is hard to define. That makes choosing the most influential artists of the last ten years even more difficult, especially considering the cultural contrasts and aesthetic binaries at play throughout this time.

The last decade has been a whirlwind of high-low arts battles: Jeff Koons reemerged as one of the highest-paid and still critically derided artists of our time. As street art became accepted as a legitimate art form, British firebrand Banksy kept things somehow both profitable and provocative. A crew of over-drugged and sometimes over-hyped Lower East Siders scrambled to the top of the art world, led by Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow. Performance became a cause célèbre, and Marina Abramovic became an actual celebrity. It was a time of massive shifts, aesthetically and philosophically.

Considering how broad a definition art has at this moment, the people here are as various as they are influential. We selected artists that shaped public consciousness, others who redefined what the art market is, those who bridged the gap between product and process, those who’ve had a profound effect on other artists, those who express the cultural condition most effectively, and those who spent the most time in the limelight—these are The Most Influential Artists of the Last Decade.

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Elizabeth Peyton

40. Elizabeth Peyton

Medium: Painting

Elizabeth Peyton re-contextualized small-scale oil portraits hundreds of years after they went out of vogue. How? By choosing celebrity subjects for a medium previously reserved for depictions of royalty and the aristocracy. Since her rise to prominence in the mid '90s, her profile has only grown, including a retrospective at New York's New Museum in 2008.

KR

39. KR

Medium: Graffiti

If anything has mirrored the rise of graffiti culture and its acceptance in the mainstream marketplace, it would have to be the ink brand Krink. The brainchild of former graffiti writer KR (otherwise known as Craig Costello) Krink began as a home-brewed graffiti ink formula that over time blossomed into a successful art-supply company. By 2008, The New York Times was profiling Costello as well as taggers and artists who were using his product. Influential? From the medium to the message.

George Condo

38. George Condo

Medium: Illustration

If anything, George Condo's constant crossover presence in the worlds of art, literature and illustration make him indelible. He's collaborated with everyone from William Burroughs to Jack Kerouac. His work is so ubiquitous it simply is part of the culture at large. As many artists have turned to design work, so has Condo. His graphic, primitive painting graced the cover of Kanye West's 2010 masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy—you know his work, even if you don't.

Dan Colen

37. Dan Colen

Medium: Painting, Installation, and Conceptual Art

Dan Colen is a fascinating presence, known as much for his flops as for his feats. That's partially what makes him so influential; in 2010, he set a sour-note art-world rubric when his Gagosian show titled "Poetry" went down in flames. It consisted of four paintings, a brick wall, a flipped-over skateboard ramp, and a row of 13 kicked-over motorcycles. He's been derided critically as too juvenile, and yet, everyone keeps talking about him. He's climbing back into public consciousness with a tiny show at New York's Oko Gallery in June.

David Choe

36. David Choe

Medium: Painting

If anything, painter David Choe is renowned for how he was compensated for murals created on the outside of the Facebook headquarters in 2007. Described as an "inveterate gambler," Choe received his payment in the form of Facebook stock- options now worth more than $200 million dollars. When his murals were recreated for The Social Network, the film following the story of Facebook, it wasn't the first time his work appeared on the silver screen. He'd created visuals for the sets of many popular films before, including Juno and The Glass House. His 2008 portrait of Barack Obama was displayed in the White House. The same year, a documentary called Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe was released.

Curtis Kulig

35. Curtis Kulig

Medium: Graffiti and Design

"Love me" is a simple phrase yet one that's not uttered aloud too often. Graffiti artist and designer Curtis Kulig seemed to realize how familiar and yet rare the phrase was, bringing the plea to streets across the world with his instantly recognizable tags. In a way that bridged the medium with the intent of the work (pleading for validation seems to be one direct method of graffiti) Kulig continued a street-level commentary started by Basquiat (as SAMO) and carried on by writers like Jim Joe. The defining factor? Kulig's inadvertent subtlety.

Barry McGee

34. Barry McGee

Medium: Illustration, Street Art, and Installation

Barry McGee's distinct visual style has been a subject of focus in both the street art and design communities. His use of text, his bold and simple color pallet, and iconic figures are instantly recognizable. Though he's never been thrilled with urban living, the San Francisco-based McGee has made the most of it, tagging Twist with relentless persistence.

Similarly, the artist has had trouble with mainstream assimilation of his work. "The more I learned about the art world, the more my interest in what was going on outside of it increased," he's said. "I didn't have any desire to bring graffiti inside the school's walls or anything." In 2010, he was commissioned to paint the infamous Bowery mural wall in New York City; he responded simply with knots of tags. Two years later, he had his first retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Geoff McFetridge

33. Geoff McFetridge

Medium: Illustration

An illustrator like Geoff McFetridge permeates culture almost silently, crossing his own aesthetic with commercial work in a way that's not possible to ignore for its sheer prolificacy—he's worked on many, many commercial projects, including films and clothing. As Seattle Art Museum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Michael Darling put it: "McFetridge is well-known within the graphic design community for imagery that is economical and spare, yet powerfully communicative. Geoff-developed motifs echo themes found in sculpture, such as the relationship between man-made and natural forms, the interplay between two- and three-dimensional space, and visual conundrums."

Ari Marcopolous

32. Ari Marcopolous

Medium: Photography

Marcopoulos began his art practice in the early '80s as a photographer documenting fringe subcultures and youth movements and even shot fellow New York artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat during his early years in New York City. But it was in the '90s that he became a ubiquitous hip-hop portraitist. And now, the 56-year-old has seen his work flourish in the mainstream once again; he took the photo for the cover of Jay Z's new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail.

Kara Walker

31. Kara Walker

Medium: Visual Art and Installation

Walker's often two-toned work represents the binary division of race in America and across the world. Though she's worked in many media, her most famous work is that of cutout silhouettes in black and white, depicting often-contentious scenes of injustice. Her silhouettes work to finish an incomplete narrative of the antebellum south, and she's displayed work all over the world.

In 2007, Time Magazine named Walker one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Just ten years earlier, she was one of the youngest people ever to win a McArthur Genius Grant. Creating works with titles like The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos and inspired by events like Hurricane Katrina, Walker does not shy from complicated subjects. Walker's work is now in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim, the Tate, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Musée d'art moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg.

Carsten Holler

30. Carsten Holler

Medium: Installation and Perceptual Art

This Belgian-born scientist-cum-artist continually flips the idea of art consumption on its head, making the viewing experience more tangible by disrupting the boundaries of art's reality. Holler's work has been as playful as it's been varied; vehicles, slides, toys, games, drugs, live animals, performances, lectures, films, strobes, mirrors, eyes, and sensory deprivation tanks (which Holler dubbed Psycho Tanks) have all been a part of his practice. His installations have often asked viewers to ingest psychedelic mushrooms or wear vision-disrupting glasses. Perhaps his most well known works are his installations of tubular metal slides into buildings. In 2011, as part of his retrospective at New York's New Museum, his installation cut through three floors of the museum.

Martha Cooper

29. Martha Cooper

Medium: Photography

The street art revolution and its mainstream validation would hardly have been possible without even a modicum of documentation from the movement's early days. That was where photographer Martha Cooper came in. Since the 1970s, Cooper captured all the graffiti she laid eyes upon, inspiring legions of photographers and street artists alike.

Kenneth Goldsmith

28. Kenneth Goldsmith

Medium: Poetry and Conceptual Art

Poet, critic, visual, sound, and conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith has an immense list of accolades; he's had documentaries made about him, he's compiled a book of Andy Warhol interviews, he's a University of Pennsylvania writing professor, he's an online archivist at a place called UbuWeb, he held the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University, he received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in 2009, and hosts a radio show on WFMU. Hell, in 2011, he even read for the president.

But Goldsmith didn't rise to mainstream consciousness until 2013, when he began his Printing Out The Internet project. For a writer who works in "uncreative writing," this was about as simple as it sounds. Goldsmith asked the public to print out the Internet and mail it to him in Mexico City, where he would exhibit the collection. He quickly amassed ten tons of paper, and he's still accepting submissions for the project from the public until August 26, 2013.

Yayoi Kusama

27. Yayoi Kusama

Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Multimedia Art, Performance, etc.

Attempting to sum up Kusama's career is no small task. Her immensity is unavoidable this far into the 83-year-old's life as painter, sculptor, novelist, poet, collagist, multimedia and performance artist. Importance derives from her prolificacy, her obsession with art as practice and repetition as method, and the sheer volume of her output. (She's still active, painting from a studio close to the Shinjuku mental hospital she's self-committed to.)

For an artist who prefigured many art movements at her most influential period—New York City from '57 until she returned to Japan in '72—Kusama's sense of artist as author has always been enormous. She's sketched rubrics for minimalism, pop art, and feminist art movements years before their best-known figures. Even so, her profile had not risen quite so high as following her 2012 Whitney Museum retrospective, during which she simultaneously worked with Louis Vuitton.

Dash Snow

26. Dash Snow

Medium: Photography and Visual Art

Before his death from overdose in 2009, Dash Snow generated a body of work that represented the troubled and confused times the art world faced. He was heir to a fortune but found fame as a photographer and artist in the kind of crumbling, decimated spaces thought to belie his station. Drugs, sex, and casual politics meet in Snow's depictions of downtown New York art-world excess.

Snow's work came to represent a highbrow-lowbrow battle in an unstable world. As one critic put it shortly after his death, Snow's work "captures this period bracketed by the fall of the World Trade Center and the fall of the financial system." Though he was seen in some circles as over-privileged and a pretender, these criticisms also fueled his work. It was this constant dynamic of never knowing where he fit that lit Snow's flame and eventually pushed the notoriously reckless artist over the edge.

Ryan Trecartin

25. Ryan Trecartin

Medium: Video

Ryan Trecartin is a rare beast. His work looks like everything we've ever seen happening at once and nothing we've ever been exposed to. Despite the rather grating visual and audio effects present in almost every Trecartin video, his work functions as a unique thermometer that records the searing pace of media fly-by in our culture today. At times it doesn't makes sense, and it hurts, and it feels like you're going crazy, and then you remember that this is exactly what it's like to be surrounded and influenced by hundreds of screens, moving images, and foreign personalities everyday. Trecartin's work is a creative distillation of all that spectacular chaos and, in light of his exposure to a wider audience, has generated a new approach and appreciation for video art.

Paul McCarthy

24. Paul McCarthy

Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Drawing, Performance, and Photography

Artist Paul McCarthy has been pushing the limits of audiences since his first Hot Dog performance in the 1970s. Since then, he has made Santa-head dildo and oversized stainless steel butt plug sculptures viable as fine art. Most recently, he created an expansive installation at New York City's Park Avenue Armory resembling some twisted version of Snow White's fantastical world, titled WS. His darkly tinted humor reframes the world within the hysteria of McCarthy social commentary. And though he is often cited as one of the most influential artists of recent decades, his installation at the Armory (on view until August 4, 2013) only serves as another testament to McCarthy's unbridled wit, courage and imagination.

Gabriel Orozco

23. Gabriel Orozco

Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Installations, etc.

Orozco represents to this generation just how broad an artist's body of work can reach; he never lets a single medium define him, a practice that philosophically matches our media consumption habits, where video, audio, text, photography, figure, and sound all mutate into one monolith. That is Gabriel Orozco's practice: merging the everyday with the extraordinary. Though most of the works shown in his 2009 MOMA show were from the late '90s, they did not resonate any less with the public. His mind-bending sculptures, photography, paintings, and installations continue an institution of critique begun by Marcel Duchamp, erasing and redrawing the lines between what is art and how it functions in "the real world."

Mike Kelley

22. Mike Kelley

Medium: Sculpture, Performance, and Video

Mike Kelley's work spans from found-object sculpture and installations to collage, performance and video. The Michigan native collaborated with renowned creative greats such as Paul McCarthy, John Miller, and Tony Ousler. In the 1980s, after his time as an MFA candidate at CalArts (under tutelage of the likes of John Baldessari) he began to create works using the materials many of us know him for today: crocheted blankets, fabric dolls and secondhand stuffed animals.

After his devastating passing in early 2012, Holland Cotter of the The New York Times described Kelley as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion." News of his death prompted a Facebook page calling to re-create Kelley's 1987 work, MORE LOVE HOURS THAN CAN EVER BE REPAIRED AND THE WAGES OF SIN. The memorial sprung up in Highland Park. Locals and Kelley-admirers alike left everything from candles and dried corn to afghans, candles and stuffed toys. The impromptu memorial remained up for a month before it was dismantled, at which point the contents were given to the Mike Kelley Foundation.

Ron English

21. Ron English

Medium: Painting and Street Art

While many artists in the last decade have sought to align their work with branded products in order to make a buck, provocative pop-painter and street artist Ron English did just the opposite. English used his critical eye to turn the imagery of monster corporations into critiques of those corporations themselves. Whether you recognize his name or not, you almost certainly recognize his work—his recent painting of an obese Ronald McDonald became ubiquitous with a more-health conscious America and appeared in the documentary Supersize Me. It's not just English's visual work that's influential; it's the ideology therein.

Shirin Neshat

20. Shirin Neshat

Medium: Photography and Film

Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat's work is mainly photography and filmed performance. But in recent years, her work has expanded to include poetic (and award-winning) feature length films. A large mid-career retrospective at the Detroit Institute of the Arts has brought together decades of her work that explore the difficult tussles of identity, gender, and power within Islamic and Western traditions.

Cory Arcangel

19. Cory Arcangel

Medium: Drawing, Video, Performance, and Digital Art

This Brooklyn-based artist seems to be simultaneously poking fun and making good use of updated and outdated technology. Whether it is Photoshop gradients, arcade bowling games (Various Self Playing Bowling Games aka Beat the Champ), or YouTube video-sampling (Arnold Schoenberg, op. 11 and a couple of thousand short films about Glenn Gould), Arcangel manipulates our familiar technological friends, from Nintendo to Internet advert algorithms, to reflect (and sometimes re-enact) the immense pleasure and futility of the tech-enabled world we live in today.

Maurizio Cattelan

18. Maurizio Cattelan

Medium: Sculpture and Installation

This Italian-born artist has made waves most recently from his stunning retrospective installation at the Guggenheim Museum in 2011. But his notoriety inspired long before then as "provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times." Cattelan began as a furniture designer, and if we skip ahead in time a bit, we would see Cattelan's portfolio of work bloom with taxidermy suicidal squirrels and headless horses, as well as effigies of himself and famous figures like Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteor. His wit permeates all facets of his work: sculptural, curatorial and publishing (see his magazine project Toilet Paper), and coalesces into a sly commentary on his anxieties of production as an artist and the art world at large.

Tino Sehgal

17. Tino Sehgal

Medium: Performance and Installation

Tino Sehgal is best known for his 2010 work This Progress at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which for many changed the parameters of an art-oriented experience for many contemporary museum-goers. The famous Frank Lloyd Wright atrium was emptied out completely, save for guides of various ages that led patrons up the spiraling ramp. Although an empty gallery is not unprecedented in the art world, the form in which Sehgal sold his work to the museum is; no documentation, no paperwork, no drawn out proceedings (ostensibly)... just a good old fashioned hand shake.

Cindy Sherman

16. Cindy Sherman

Medium: Photography

Cindy Sherman's work in self-portraiture has explored and exploded the roles of fame, celebrity, class, women, sex, and that of the artist as well. She always photographs herself in disguise, so much so that she's largely unrecognizable even outside of her work. In 2012, she MoMA displayed a retrospective of her work. This was an event that congealed around an episode of the popular radio program This American Life, in which Ira Glass explored the condition of anonymity in her work—a stranger had claimed to be her, at the museum, in the exhibit that was hers. It was later found by the reporters that the imposter was not Sherman. In 2013, she helped to organize the Venice Biennial.

Walid Raad

15. Walid Raad

Medium: Photography

Walid Raad is a fictional collective known as The Atlas Group (Raad produces all of the collective's work). The Atlas Group's work is as multi-faceted as Raad himself; it ranges from video and photography to lectures and essays that grapple with contemporary Lebanese history. The collective has published a number of writings regarding the latter to exposure the seams with which history is strewn together, and recompose a history reorganized to self-efface its own constructed nature. The Atlas Group's work not only makes space for imaginative collectives, but also has the potential to stir readily accepted positions on recent history.

JR

14. JR

Medium: Photography and Installation

French-born street artist JR has changed the way we look at faces. JR first gained notoriety in the mid-2000s for his Portraits of a Generation poster campaign that featured large-format pictures of teenagers from the housing projects around Paris. His art-in-the-streets attitude was quickly adopted by the city, and soon JR was carrying out projects in Palestine, Israel, Brazil, Germany, the US, and the Netherlands. By the end of the decade, photorealistic monumental portraits scaling urban architecture became JR's stamp on a city. His intention is not to plaster up his own ego but rather to give the facade of the city the face of its people, and vice-versa.

Takashi Murakami

13. Takashi Murakami

Medium: Painting, Sculpture, and Installation

Japanese artist and Superflat instigator, Takashi Murakami may be responsible for a whole new pileup of cultural capital for the anime world. His big-breasted robo-women and totemic fantasy Superflat characters were given plenty of breathing room during Murakami's 2008 retrospective at the MOCA in Los Angeles, and again in 2010 at the Palace of Versailles in France (at which point he was only the third artist to ever have the privilege), as well as in a number of museums and galleries across the globe for at least at two decades previous. Murakami himself coined the term Superflat; it is both a historical theory of visual compression and also that of a cultural mash of high and low cultures. So, as per Murakami's own theory, his global presence does not cease at the ends of the art market but bleeds into commercial endeavors in the form of collaborations ranging from the likes of Louis Vuitton to Pharrell Williams.

Ryan McGinley

12. Ryan McGinley

Medium: Photography

New York Magazine described photographer Ryan McGinley as "an intimate imagist," and his ability to capture candid moments of vulnerability is only bolstered by the naiveté of the amateur models he usually chooses as his subjects. McGinley is also the youngest artist (at the age of 25) to have a solo show at MoMA's P.S. 1. He received the prestigious International Center of Photography's Infinity Young Photographer Award in 2007. The award is designated to be "given to those who have contributed new terms to the photography field vernacular," and McGinley certainly has with his photographs of twenty-something nudes road tripping, drinking, smoking, frolicking and living by colored concert light.

Barbara Kruger

11. Barbara Kruger

Medium: Conceptual Art

Barbara Kruger's aesthetic has become a chronic condition. Some people see her work once, and they can't seem to shake the red-black-and-white. (See any coveted five-panel Supreme hat for details.) While her works of earlier decades take on stronger political stances, Kruger's style has seemed to permeate a number of different spheres—both social and aesthetic. Her work can be seen anywhere from Standard Hotel beach towels and Los Angeles billboards to some of the most respected museums and galleries in the world. She was a part of the first South Korean Biennale in 2008, and she's often stuck out her neck to help keep the arts alive.

Jeff Koons

10. Jeff Koons

Medium: Sculpture

If every time you look at a twisted balloon dog and think: Jeff Koons, just know you're not alone. His monumental high-shine dogs, bunnies, broken eggs, and hearts are only a part of this ex-commodities broker's portfolio. In 2008, Koons also became one of three artists to use the Palace of Versailles as an installation space. He has also managed to convince the world that a 43-foot tall topiary puppy is in fact the finest of arts.

Koons' work feeds off the saccharine glaze of kitsch, pop-culture, and critiques of manufacturing, repackaged for more cultured consumption. The whole gesture seems ironic at times, but seeing as his work has been collected by so many and gained so much notoriety (and derided at the same time), it would feel silly to ignore all the attention paid to it. He's represented by the vaunted Gagosian Gallery in New York City, and his establishment cred only keeps growing, even if he rarely is involved in making his artworks. "Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is," he's said of hiring assistants to fabricate his art.

Os Gemeos

9. Os Gemeos

Medium: Street Art and Folk Art

These Brazilian twins who work under the moniker Os Gemeos (which means "The Twins" in Portuguese, of course) helped to shape the current function and public perception of street art. By incorporating folklore, political commentary, and traditional graffiti styles in their public art practice, Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo carved an unmistakable niche for themselves in the global graffiti scene. Their instantly recognizable characters and style—in both legal and illegal forms—have shown up across the world. In 2008, following the Tate Modern show called "Street Art," it took nearly as long for workers to remove a massive Os Gemeos piece on the building's façade as it did for the twins to put the piece up—the establishment may try and buff the duo, but their mark on this culture is much more permanent than just one giant mural.

Miranda July

8. Miranda July

Medium: Performance and Collaboration

Miranda July began her career as an artist when she dropped out of UC Santa Cruz her sophomore year and moved up to Portland, Oregon to pursue performance art. One of July's best-known works, Joanie4Jackie was started in 1996. The project called for short films from women around the country, which she compiled onto videocassettes in the style of a chain letter. The videos containing the short films of various female filmmakers were then sent back to them. Since 1996 there have been 13 incarnations of the project, the most recent produced in 2002.

Also in 2002, July began her project Learning to Love You More with Harrell Fletcher. The project was considered a collaborative public artwork that included over 60 easily do-able activities ranging from dictating imaginary phone conversations to making freckle constellations on a friend. The 5,000 plus responses to the project were then posted to the Learning to Love You More website, and contributions came from a wide age range from all over the globe. July's work seems to spawn from an authentic place that wishes to show everyone that they can make art too. By the time she made her signature feature-length films Me And You And Everyone We Know in 2005 and The Future in 2011, she'd cemented her position in the art world.

Damien Hirst

7. Damien Hirst

Medium: Sculpture and Painting

One man has never gotten so famous from one rotting shark. Granted, the YBA (Young British Artists) team-captain, entrepreneur, and art collector, Damien Hirst has more going for him than a putrefying sea creature; but his affinity for animals in vitrines is undeniable. Death and spectacle appear to be running themes in Hirst's body of work, whether it is a global Gagosian-coordinated Spot Painting exhibition spree or a bisected cow preserved in formaldehyde. Regardless of the man's morbid curiosity (though investment might be the more apt phrase), Hirst's art market power is just as potent as the potential shock-and-awe of his pieces. In 2008, all the works from his solo exhibition Beautiful Inside My Head Forever were sold at auction. Though such an event sounds par for the course, it was actually unprecedented among living artists.

Alexander McQueen

6. Alexander McQueen

Medium: Fashion

Not all art-world fanatics can always be convinced that fashion is a form of high art. But that idea can now be met with near-universal dismissal following the 2011 Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective of designer Alexander McQueen. The exhibition, "Savage Beauty," showed viewers that clothes can not only be a form of high art, they can also be transcendent. "Savage Beauty" was variously breathtaking, terrifying, inspirational, and sublime. Though McQueen committed suicide in 2010, the impact of his work on fashion-as-art can still be felt. This year, the Met opened another fashion-centric show, this one focused on the punk movement.

Terry Richardson

5. Terry Richardson

Medium: Photography

Terry Richardson's work is as recognizable as his flannel-clad, beard-and-glasses visage. He's shot photographs from his New York City studio of absolutely every notable celebrity for absolutely every major publication of the last 10 years. This includes Barack Obama, Lil Wayne, Lady Gaga, all of Odd Future, James Franco, Beyonce, and so on and so on... He shot the cover of Justin Timberlake's landmark Futuresex/Lovesounds and has captured some of the most ridiculous candid photos of some of the most highly desired people on the planet. Even if he suffered some sexual assault charges in the midst of the decade (despite the public, hyper-sexual content of his gallery work) it only served to raise his profile. Richardson is unavoidable, for better or for worse.

Shepard Fairey

4. Shepard Fairey

Medium: Graphic Design, Illustration, and Street Art

Graphic designer, illustrator, and street artist Shepard Fairey designed the infamous 2008 Hope poster featuring Barack Obama. The image began as one of a series of many in support of Obama's presidential campaign and eventually pulled ahead as a defining image, not only for 2008, but perhaps for many years to come. Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker dubbed it "the most efficacious American political illustration since 'Uncle Sam Wants You.'" The sale of upwards of 300,000 stickers and 500,000 posters of Hope were funded a part of the grassroots campaign for Obama—even if the Associated Press sued him for copyright infringement over the image later. Fairey's work reminds us that maybe art still has power to change the world.

Banksy

3. Banksy

Medium: Graffiti

Banksy has transformed the face of graffiti into something it never saw itself becoming: the subject of books, major museum shows, documentaries and luxury items. His works have been peppered across major modern landmarks like the West Bank Barrier and in unassuming alleyways in London. His stenciled work is deceivingly simple, maybe even economical; the directness of the images only helps to underscore the critical social commentary of Banksy's choosing. But the aura of his work is soon to change.

Most recently, the wall on which Tottenham's No Ball Games work resided was removed by an anonymous source to be sold, much to the lament of Tottenham citizens. The work of art, which at one point would have been conceived as a defiant act of vandalism, has now become a neighborhood landmark, and (unfortunately) is not free from the reaches of the high-end art market. Neither is his hand in the world of film; Banksy's 2010 documentary (maybe?) Exit Through The Gift Shop set a complicated, convoluted standard for the ideas of anonymity and celebrity in street art—we're still not sure how much of the film was staged.

Marina Abramovic

2. Marina Abramovic

Medium: Performance

Some consider Marina Abramovic the "grandmother of performance art" and perhaps rightly so. Her massive 2010 retrospective at the MoMA in New York City, "The Artist is Present," exposed patrons to the performances, props and ephemera of Abramovic's thirty-plus year artistic career. The exhibition was on display from March 14 to May 31, and everyday Abramovic sat silently on the building's second floor from open to close. At the culmination of the show, she posed there for a total 736 hours and 30 minutes. Beside setting a new standard for durational performance pieces, she is also planning to open the Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI), which will be solely dedicated to the performance, preservation, and interdisciplinary exploration of durational works—the $10,000 Kickstarter reward for the institute is "Nothing." She's also making a movie about James Franco's life. Someone sitting so still never go so much attention.

Ai Weiwei

1. Ai Weiwei

Medium: Sculpture, Photography, Performance, etc.

Ai Weiwei cannot simply be defined as an "artist." Such a label would be painfully limiting considering that in addition to creating sculptures (ranging from traditional sculptural objects to his collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron for Beijing's Olympic Stadium), installations, films and photographs, he is also upheld as a cultural critic and political dissident. It seems that Weiwei's life is a full-bodied one, where art knows no bounds or media, but instead permeates just about everything he does. From documenting his imprisonment by the Chinese government for free speech issues to creating a play #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei around that incident, from uncovering social inequities of the Chinese government in his 2013 Venice Biennial installation to releasing biting satires on "Gangnam Style" and metal music, Ai always finds an outlet for expression. And the world always finds a way to watch.