Hierarchy in Art

Sigutin invited artists to measure their height. The resulting table revealed the leaders in art: the tallest artist was from the Netherlands. Amusingly, a representative of Western art turned out to be above the locals. Later, Sigutin aggregated all the data and calculated the average height of a Moscow artist—167 cm.

For art oritios, curators, and art historians, he devised a different procedure to measure professional qualities. They were to be weighed to determine the degree of their art world gravitas. The leader was critic Andrei Kovalev. According to the results of measuring the art historical circle, the average weight was 66 kg.

The project also explored the audience for contemporary art, serving as a kind of sociological tool for understanding who takes an interest in such a peculiar practice. Visitors recorded their age‑ranging from schoolchildren to pen‑sioners—in another table.

Concluding the project, Sigutin created his own “chamber of measures and weights”: a wooden pole corresponding to the height of the average artist and a sack of potatoes equivalent to the weight of the average critic. The audience was represented by a cake with 28 candles marking the average age of visitors to the gallery in Tryokhprudny Lane.

In this way, Hierarchy in Art aimed to analyze the phenomenon that art historian Viktor Misiano called the “tusovka” — the main driving force behind the artistic process of the 1990s.