the rankings and confront them with their own, supposedly more complex views.
Taking publics into account is thus crucial to explain the institutionalization of rankings in different societal fields. In the next section, we use this perspective to explore the long-term historical trajectories of rankings in three fields: the arts, professional sports, and science/universities.
On the institutionalization of rankings: Three historical cases
Arts, competitive sports, and science/universities: these three fields share a procliv-ity to experiment with rankings long before the onset of the frenzy in the 1980s. The historical trajectories of rankings, however, vary considerably from field to field:
Whereas in the case of sports, they were incorporated quite quickly and effectively, their career in the arts and science/universities has been more complex and am-bivalent. Studying these three fields comparatively thus might help to specify the ways in which, and the conditions under which, rankings are likely to become insti-tutionalized. In all cases, our conceptualization of rankings draws particular atten-tion to (1) discourses of performance, competiatten-tion, and publicity/transparency; and (2) the roles of, and possible tensions between, expert and non-expert audiences.
Fig. 1: Balance des Peintres (De Piles 1708, in Spoerhase, Rank-ings: A Pre-History, 96 ).
this amounted to a vibrant international discourse on the quantitative compari-son of artisticperformances. Among those emulating de Piles were Mark Arkenside’s Balance of Poets(1746), the anonymously publishedScale to Measure the Merits of Mu-sicians(1776), as well as theKritische Skala der vorzüglichsten deutschen Dichter(1792) by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart.29 For 100 years, none of these early ex-periments was followed by the creation of a hierarchical order based on an overall score. It was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the copycat pro-cess finally resulted in the production of the first table with overall scoresanda hierarchical order compiled by the French author Jean-Francois Sobry in 1810 (Fig.
2).30As it turned out, Raphael, according to Sobry, was the greatest painter of all time.
29 Mark Arkenside’sBalance of Poets(1746),Scale to Measure the Merits of Musicians(1776),Kritische Skala der vorzüglichsten deutschen Dichter(1792) by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart.
30 Jean-Francois Sobry,Poétique des arts ou cours de peinture et de littérature comparées, Paris 1810, S. 148–169 (De la balance des peintres).
Fig. 2: Balance des Peintres rectifiée (Sobry 1810, in Spoerhase, Rankings: A Pre-History, 121 ).
This might have been the first proper art ranking—if it had been continued by similar tables in the following years. However, it seems to have remained the last one of its kind. Indeed, artists and art critics alike had grown deeply skeptical of such types of comparisons early on. Even some of the creators such as Jean-Francois Sobry were among the critics: “‘Let us love what is beautiful when we see it, without bothering about weighing it. Let us repay the enthusiasm of talent with the enthusiasm of esteem; and leave the scales to the merchants.”31In this quote, he clearly emphasizes the view, shared by others in the decades to come, that quanti-tative comparisons resemble economic reasoning and are therefore alien to purist ideals of aesthetic-artistic excellence. We might speculate that rankings and other forms of quantification carry a level of specificity of judgment that is at odds with the somewhat ambiguous understanding ofgeniusin the emerging artistic field in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, as Bourdieu (1994) elaborates, the rules of art, institutionalized in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, prescribe the produc-tion of artworks for their own sake and not for fame or money.32Competition for reputation, as suggested by the rankings, might give rise to “wrong” motives that taint the ideal ofl’art pour l’art.
31 Sobry 1810, in Spoerhase, Rankings: A Pre-History, 111.
32 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu,The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Cambridge, Eng-land 1994.
Another distinguishing characteristic of these early experiments can be found in the writings of the aforementioned Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart: “It is indeed hard to measure spirit and intellect like body height. It still has its value, though: The dwarf sees more clearly that he is indeed a dwarf if he compares him-self with the Potsdam guard (our translation)”.33In applying the metaphor of body height, Schubart rejects the idea of artists striving to improve their performances on the grounds of comparisons with other artists. A dwarf evidently will always be a dwarf because he cannot change his body size. Contemporary rankings, as in the section defined above, build on the opposite idea—that is, the possibility of move-ment between positions and the notion that everyone can, and should, constantly improve her or his performance. Indeed, most contemporary rankings would not make much sense if scores were final and set in stone. Against this backdrop, it seems as if early experiments with the quantification of artistic performances in the eighteenth to early nineteenth century focused on evaluating thehistory of art genresrather than suggesting the production of competition. According to our con-ceptualization, they should therefore be designated as protorankings, rather than as rankings in the contemporary sense.
In the decades following the publication of Sobry’s ranking, art critics and ex-perts confirmed the critical rejection of any kind of quantitative judgment of artis-tic performance. In 1866, Carl Justi describes quantitative evaluations as “formu-las which attribute numbers to creative minds just like students receive grades”;
Clement de Ries, in 1882, calls them “foolish” and “absurd.” Others even seemed to fail to get the purpose of creating rank-ordered tables: Richard M. Meyer, refer-ring to Schubart’s table, thinks of them as “strange” (1911); Sigmund von Lempicki deems them “odd” (1920).34Conspicuously, the demise of these early experiments with the quantitative evaluation of art performances coincided with the profes-sionalization of art criticism, which suggests a successful monopolization of the authority to evaluate artistic performance by a professional group of intellectual
“gatekeepers”.35
Quantitative evaluations of artistic performances remained scarce thereafter.
The situation, however, changed in the second half of the 20thcentury with an in-flux of new quantified evaluations in the arts.36 The most visible of those forms did not seem to evaluate artistic performance as such but instead the market value and/or reputation of artists. In other words, in contrast to the protorankings of the eighteenth century, theydo notclaim to be able to quantifyaesthetic comparisons. The 33 Schubart,Kritische Skala, in Spoerhase, Rankings: A Pre-History, 123.
34 All quotes are retrieved from Spoerhase, Das Maß der Potsdamer Garde, 93–95, and trans-lated by the authors.
35 Howard S. Becker,Art Worlds, Berkeley 2008.
36 Larissa Buchholz, What is a global field? Theorizing fields beyond the nation-state, in: Julian Go/Monika Krause (eds.),Fielding Transnationalism, London 2016, 31-60.
best explanation for their emergence and spread since the 1970s might be that the idea of making the market value and reputation of artiststransparenthas become more legitimate37withoutdirectlyconflicting with the established view that artistic performance cannot be quantified. Whereas the determination and knowledge of prices had been a matter of private trading networks and/or auctions for centuries, rankings were viewed as instruments with which to unveil the opaque dynamics of the art world—particularly for potential investors who lack the necessary knowl-edge and expertise to make informed buying decisions.38Rankers often make this expansion of scope in terms of audience outreach explicit, for instance in state-ments such as the following, retrieved from the homepage of theTOP 100 Artist Ranking:
“The Artist Ranking Tool cannot judge the work of a specific artist, it works by or-dering artists according to theprofessional attentionthat is invested in them. It pro-vides thewider audience with a feeling for the standing of a particular artist in the eyes of the professionalsbut is not reflective of the artist’s actual economic success. Art-Facts.Net™ acknowledges that there might be a correlation between fame and money but this is not the method of calculation behind the Artist Ranking tool.”
[emphasis added].39
By focusing on indicators such as prices, exhibitions in renowned galleries, or fea-tures in magazines, current rankings steer attention to a very specific set of indi-cators. These indicators relate at best indirectly to artistic performances, but allow for the depiction of movement within a competitive field and thus spark intense discussion between experts as well as in broader audiences. In many cases, those concerned try to delegitimize their opponents often by using vitriolic language.40 To put it in Bourdieusian terms, market-oriented rankings in the artistic field spark controversy at both the autonomous and the heterogeneous pole of the field. As a result, rankings inspire discussions as to whether such comparisons of
perfor-37 Cf. Stefan Wilbers, Grenzarbeit im Kunstbetrieb. Zur Institutionalisierung des Rankings Kun-stkompass, in: Leopold Ringel/Tobias Werron (eds.),Rankings – Soziologische Fallstudien, Wies-baden 2019, 57-87.
38 Cf. Paul Buckermann, Back from Business. On Commensuration, Construction, and Commu-nication of a Global Art World in the Ranking Kunstkompass, in:Kapsula1 (3/2016), 12-18.
39 Artfacts, 2018, in: the homepage of the TOP 100 Artist Ranking, URL: https://www.art-facts.net/tour/artist-ranking. The quote has been retrieved in 2018 and is not available any more. However, since it sums up very poignantly the ways in which rankings position them-selves in the artistic field, we decided to keep it.
40 Cf. Olav Velthuis, ArtRank and the Flippers: Apocalypse now?, in:Texte zur Kunst24 (96/2014), 34-49.
mance are legitimate or not, with participants being engaged in constant and often tense forms of “boundary work”.41
A prime example is the GermanKunstkompass(art compass), created by the jour-nalist Willi Bongard and published annually since 1970 (with the exception of 1985, when the ranking took a hiatus) in various magazines such asCapital,Manager Mag-azin, andWeltkunst.42TheKunstkompasshas used a multiplicity of indicators over the years to measure “Ruhm” (fame, reputation) such as exhibitions in esteemed museums and at major events (e.g., thedocumentain Kassel or the biennales in Venice) or articles in art magazines. The scores are then published alongside the market prices of the artists, thereby suggesting that audiences should evaluate whether or not an artist is “a good bargain.” According to Bongard’s original vision, the economic and the artistic sphere can stimulate each other: For progressive art to flourish in Germany and to “catch up” with American artists, the German art scene of the 1960s needed the stimulation of progressive market mechanisms. The need to manufacture market transparency via rankings was thus triggered by the comparison of Germany with the United States. The reactions within the commu-nity were fierce, especially because the originator, Willi Bongard, was neither an artist nor an art critic but a journalist who challenged the authority of established gatekeepers (curators and art critics). In contrast to the early experiments in the eighteenth century, the Kunstkompassand other contemporary art rankings pre-vailed, and are regularly produced and published by media organizations to target large (nonexpert) audiences. Some rankings, such as the online platformArtRank, are even more explicit in their emphasis on the market value of art.
To sum up, quantitative comparisons resembling today’s rankings emerged ini-tially in the artistic field in the eighteenth to early nineteenth century. We call them protorankings rather than rankings, because in contrast to modern rankings, they did not aim at constructing competition. They quantified thehistorical-comparative judgments of criticsabout famous dead artists and did not suggest competition be-tween contemporary artists. Even these protorankings were rejected in the artis-tic field in the nineteenth century, basednoton resistance against comparison as such but on critique of the economic aura surroundingquantifiedcomparisons. The rejection of rankings coincided with the institutionalization of other practices of comparing artistic performances, especially art criticism that tends to see quanti-fied performances as “foolish,” “absurd,” “odd,” or “strange.” Rankings based on aes-thetic criteria seem to have never fully recovered from this rejection. “Full” rankings and other forms of quantification have emerged only since the 1970s. In contrast to
41 Thomas F. Gieryn, Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists, in:American Sociological Review48 (6/1983), 781-795; Wilbers, Grenzarbeit im Kunstbetrieb.
42 Cf. Wilbers, Grenzarbeit im Kunstbetrieb.
the early experiments, they are published regularly and attract considerable atten-tion from both expert and broader audiences. However, they do not contradict the critical view of quantified comparisons in the arts specifically, because they do not claim to measure aesthetic performance directly but rather reputation or market value. Today’s art rankings thus seem less concerned with the intricacies of com-paring aesthetic performance and more focused on including nonexpert audiences in the field.