power 100".

You can't name a list more powerfully than the English magazine "ArtReview" does every year when it determines the hundred most influential people in the international art world.

Which are a lot more influencers, because Power 100 also features six artist collectives, four of them in the top 25, and at the top is a collective that's notoriously so big they can't even remember who what painted of his works: Ruangrupa.

The Indonesian artist group has always been in the top ten since they were appointed to curate Documenta 15 in 2019, but now that they curated and almost destroyed Documenta 15, they are said to be number one.

Why?

Because - "relevant for this year's number one" - Ruangrupa allowed the invited artists "to speak for themselves through their art and to give themselves their own set of rules".

The first reason is a banality, the second a refusal to curate.

Sure, something like that makes things important in today's art world: stupid and bold, they go together.

But then comes from "ArtReview" something like a serious justification for Ruangrupa's top position: The work of the collective in Kassel was overshadowed by the ongoing German discussion about anti-Semitic art exhibited there, resulting in "more positive assessments of Ruangrupa's large, polyphonic , chaotic and convivial gathering of artistic voices from the Global South”.

London is now making up for this omission, without saying a word about how “ArtReview” itself evaluates the overarching question to the Documenta makers.

At least it is acknowledged that there have been protests by invited artists in Kassel against Ruangrupa's attitude towards anti-Semitism, including Hito Steyerl, who occupies fourth place in the current "Power 100" list.

The main lesson to be learned from Ruangrupa's "magnificent experiment" is that a powerful organization cannot simply claim to value delegating responsibility, collaboration and power-sharing without then being caught off guard by losing control of things.

However, this does not mean Ruangrupa, but politics, because the documenta is now being placed under state supervision: "Power reveals itself when it's challenged".

At the top of "Power 100" were not at all the Indonesian artists helpless in the face of the allegations, but those German politicians who are said to have regained power over the Documenta.

But you don't think that consistently in the art world.