The Hot One Hundred

As frivolous and entertaining as a late night Top 100 TV show, Peter Davies’s large-scale painting The Hot One Hundred makes art history into a hilarious chart-topping exercise. Disrupting the slick aesthetic of high Minimalist painting – the colourful grid echoes something of a Gerhard Richter colour chart – with deliberately wonky handwritten presentation, he presents a list of his ‘Hot One Hundred’ artists and their best works. Bruce Nauman has the honour of first place, with ‘Almost all of it (90-95%)’; Willem de Kooning makes it in at number 34 with ‘More abstracted less figurative stuff’; Titian gets a look in at 51 with ‘Any featuring monsters/dragons.’ As amusing as the work is, Davies has a provocative point to make about the games of fame, power and acclaim in the art world: the work’s vast scale bathetically undermines the expectation of a big painting with a big meaning, instead discussing great art with the monumental vapidity of a pop countdown. Painted in 1998, the work anticipates the influential annual ‘Power 100’ ranking initiated four years later by ArtReview magazine – satire is never too far from reality.