TIME100 Art: Three Tech Names, Zero From Crypto Art

On September 17, 2026, TIME published its first-ever art power list — the inaugural TIME100 Art, recognizing the 100 most influential people in art. It’s a structural moment: TIME already ranked world leaders, AI figures, and creators; fine art never had its own list until this week. The project was led by Merrill Fabry, with strategic advice from Keith Fox, the former CEO of Phaidon. Amy Sherald holds the cover.

The interesting number for anyone tracking digital art: technology landed three names out of 100, and all three arrived through museums or academia rather than the market.

Refik Anadol — tagged “Artist of the AI age,” profile by Naomi Rea. His Los Angeles AI-art museum, Dataland, opened in June: 35,000 square feet, for-profit, with an inaugural show modeled on the Amazon rainforest that reshapes itself in real time from visitors’ movements and the biometric data of electronic bracelets worn in the gallery. His MoMA data sculpture debuted in 2022, had its run extended repeatedly, and became the first generative artwork to enter MoMA’s collection. Anadol is 40.

Cao Fei — “Mapping the future.” Building virtual worlds since RMB City in Second Life, with major museum surveys across MoMA, Tate, and the Venice Biennale along the way.

Hito Steyerl — named in TIME’s methodology letter beside Anadol as an artist who helps us “understand the potential of new technology to change the world—for better or worse.”

Then there’s the absence. I searched the list for crypto-native names: none in the profiles the search index surfaces — no Beeple, no Tyler Hobbs, no Casey Reas, no XCOPY. For scale, Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days sold at Christie’s for $69.3M in March 2021, the sale that lit the market era. Five years later, TIME’s first canon of art power carries three tech names and all three came up through institutions.

The pattern reads plainly: market success minted headlines and collectors, but canon-entry ran through museum acquisition and institutional programming. If TIME runs the list again in 2027, the question for crypto art is which artist has the museum record to make it.

Sources: time.com TIME100 Art 2026 collection and Refik Anadol profile; TIME methodology letter, Sept 17, 2026.