Then there’s Lynda Benglis, who, at 80, is the art world’s ultimate iconoclast, known for her poured-latex sculptures, which took art off the wall and placed it on the floor, but also for her revolutionary 1974 Artforum ad (look it up: New York Times standards guidelines prevent us from republishing it), which remains as arresting as it is unknowable - a shocking image still, even in an age of shocking images. Just look at Demna, the artistic director of Balenciaga and co-founder and former creative director of Vetements over his seven-year tenure at the head of the French fashion house, he has, as editor at large Nick Haramis writes in his profile, created clothes and accessories that have “become somehow symbolic of a cultural moment.” Demna’s inventions - the leather totes that resemble blue Ikea shopping bags a logo riffing on the one from Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign the pantashoe, stretchy, satiny leggings morphing seamlessly into a pair of stiletto heels - are born of and for a social media era, when everything can be spliced, and everything is branded. What we end up with, then, is a group whose talents - and place in the culture - are undeniable. The people we ultimately choose as Greats mustn’t just be accomplished they must be inimitable in some way, and their nominators must make a compelling case for their singularity. Overall, though, the exercise is good-natured: It allows us to collectively revisit or make the case for our personal heroes, ones both obvious and obscure, famous and forgotten. “Mm, yes, so-and-so,” someone else will agree dreamily, “that’s a good one.” No one ever shouts down or openly disparages anyone else’s choice, but sometimes a name is met with no reaction at all, a silence more damning than outright disapproval. “What about so-and-so?” someone will ask. The discussion can, at times, sound like a wine tasting.
The Greats nomination process - that is to say, the conversation/debate/slugfest that produces the names of the people we end up profiling for this issue - typically begins in January.
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