Smash hit

This Top Ten does not overlap at all with the artists who feature in this year’s ArtReview Power 100, a list of who wields the most influence in the art business, as decided by a panel of experts. Their top artist is the uncompromising conceptualist Bruce Nauman, followed by Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Gerhard Richter, the only painter in the ten highest-ranking artists.

The artists’ artist Top Ten consists entirely of painters, and errs towards the splodgy and the splashy type much beloved by those who revel in the craft of oil painting — artists who hang around the shelves of high-end art material suppliers, agonising over Chinese hog-hair Filbert brushes and cold-pressed linseed oil.

This is the Top Ten of an artist who thinks conceptual art is a con and that the ability to balance illusion with a love for gooey paint is paramount. It does not represent the favourites of any artist I know.

It is the taste of an art student stuck in 1962.

The Great Art Fair, Alexandra Palace, London N22 (08700 600100), tomorrow until Sunday

It's only fair...here are my own favourites

Much of the art that I love was made by artists working in traditional forms across Asia. Japanese potters, Chinese scroll painters, Indian bronze sculptors and Afghan rug weavers. My favourites from the Western canon change from year to year . . .

1 Pieter Brueghel

Grandeur and intimacy, social history, teeming with detail, The Triumph of Death my No 1.

2 Joseph Beuys

Weaves life and art seamlessly. He’s incredibly alive to texture. Gentle and political.

3 Henry Darger