A quick look under the radar

Superlative-loving ARTnews magazine has updated its 2000 survey of the world’s most underrated and overrated artists. In the January issue, 22 curators, academics, arts administrators and artists from New York to Tokyo respond to the questions “Which artists have been overlooked? And which have we been looking at too much?”

No consensus emerges, but Vito Acconci -- a veteran performance artist and conceptual sculptor based in New York -- is the most frequently cited of the underrated. Among other highly regarded artists said to have been overlooked by galleries, museums, critics and collectors are Los Angeles-based artist Betye Saar and New York sculptor Judy Pfaff, who recently won a MacArthur grant but has had a low profile in the last few years.

The underrated, says Brooklyn Museum curator Maura Reilly, “are precisely those talented artists who do not make it into Western-art survey tests. It should come as no surprise that the majority of those artists are either women ... persons of color ... people who do not fit neatly into an ‘ism’ ... people who were overshadowed by a partner-husband ... those who make challenging works that do not hang comfortably in a collector’s living room ... or people who fall geographically outside a strictly defined Western canon of art history.”

Reilly doesn’t focus on Latin Americans, but several of her colleagues do. Reflecting mainstream museums’ rising awareness of Latin American art, lists of the underrated include such artists as Artur Barrio and Waltercio Caldas of Brazil, Victor Grippo and Lygia Pape of Argentina and 17th century Mexican painter Cristobal de Villalpando.

The survey cites far more underrated than overrated artists -- perhaps because, as Italian curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev says, “when I consider artists overrated I generally ignore them.”

But some of her peers name names. Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso and German artist Anselm Kiefer are judged the most overrated, followed by other German Neo-Expressionists, American sculptor Jeff Koons and 17th century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain.