Something called the Great Art Fair, which is to be held at Alexandra Palace from tomorrow until Sunday, has commissioned a survey to find out “the artists’ artist”. They polled 500 practising artists and asked them who were their favourites living or dead.

The Top Ten was as follows:

1 Lucian Freud
2 Howard Hodgkin
3 David Hockney
4 J. M. W. Turner
5 Antoni Tapies
6 Rembrandt
7 Jack Vettriano
8 Barbara Rae
9 Frank Auerbach
10 Vincent Van Gogh

The list surprises me. Let’s start with Lucian Freud. Described by some critics as our greatest living artist, he is a wonderfully skilled and subtle painter who keeps on getting better. He’s superb at rendering North London light falling on opalescent bingo wing or a crepey turkey neck. I appreciate his genius, but he hasn’t made my Top Ten since the sixth form. He’s very good at making paintings that seem to have a lot of gravity.

The next three are favourites with the British gallery-going classes: Hodgkin, at once poetic, serious and decorative; Hockney, a fine draughtsman, a prolific experimenter, and a lovable and enthusiastic communicator; and Turner, the great great grandfather of the splodge, whose work The Fighting Temeraire recently topped a BBC poll to identify Britain’s greatest painting. Rembrandt and Van Gogh are shoo-ins for any art lover’s Top Ten. Safe choices maybe, but I have an inkling that for this particular constituency of artists, being predictable is not seen as a crime.

However, Antoni Tapies I find much more of a surprise. This Spanish painter’s rugged abstract work is often encrusted with marble dust, string, clay or old blankets. It should make me think of the painter as earthy Catalan hero hacking out great spurts of authentic passion but instead I see him as the patron saint of beige hotel art.

Jack Vettriano’s inclusion is not a surprise. The painter of soft-porn nostalgia, who once said: “The art world is not a lot to do with art,” is, along with Beryl Cook, a kind of poster-child for all those who dislike where contemporary art is going. Those peevish anti-intellectuals who get angry at the Turner Prize and feel excluded by “the conceptual art mafia”. Vettriano is a favourite of showbiz collectors and football managers.

Barbara Rae is the only woman on the list and the one name I did not recognise. She is a Royal Academician, has a good sense of colour and paints near-abstract landscapes. If your aunt came to visit and saw one of Rae’s pictures over the fireplace she would describe it as “cheerful”.

Frank Auerbach is the only artist on the list who might get onto my own Top Ten. I find myself drawn more and more to the quiet authority of his works. I feel his hard-won images, wrested from the curdling paint, are a rebuke to an art world overpopulated with flashy one-liners. I am seduced by his aura of self-effacing, nose-to-the-grindstone integrity that emanates from the unsettled paint.

I once visited a collector who had a superb group of British paintings, including a Freud and a Francis Bacon, but it was her Auerbach that I wanted to steal.

So this Top Ten has left me puzzled. In fact the Great Art Fair has left me puzzled, too — what kind of an event needs to call itself “great”? It does not share many, if any, exhibitors with that hugely successful shopping mecca of the commercial art world, the Frieze art fair.

This list may well be representative of the tastes of many artists working in Britain today, but I do not feel that it reflects the preferences of those artists who are likely to achieve critical and commercial success in the contemporary art field. It does not include anyone who represents the changes that have occurred in art over the last 30 years, let alone what is going on today.

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