A new report comparing the might of the world's leading contemporary art cities finds New York leads by a considerable margin, with London coming in second.
Professor Robert Huggins of Cardiff University has devised and researched the World Art Cities Index (WACI), the first systematic, quantitative ranking of the world's leading contemporary art cities. The report covers a large number of new areas exploring the global connections and changes taking place in the contemporary art world.
The study scores cities on measures including the number of contemporary art museums, galleries, and internationally recognised artists based there. New York's score comfortably leads the list (496.1 vs London's 339.6), but a 2035 scenario forecast finds its strength starting to soften, with Hong Kong, Berlin and São Paulo predicted to show gains.
Professor Huggins, based at the School of Social and Spatial Sciences, said: "Art is important to cities because of the lasting impact it can have on its development."
When diverse creatives cluster in a place, the result is not only great art but the economic and social transformation of the city that hosts it.
"Florence, Amsterdam, Paris and New York were made, in part, by the creative ecosystems they housed. Art has been a maker of cities, not merely an ornament to them.
"The contemporary evidence assembled here matters for that argument because it concerns where this city-making capacity is now located and relates to the world of contemporary art and the creative ecosystems through which it operates."
The Index studies and scores on three key areas:
Production - where contemporary art is made: measured by art schools, resident artist communities, and recognition in international rankings of leading artists.
Market – where contemporary art is bought and sold: measured by galleries, art fairs, and the presence of leading dealers, collectors and fair directors.
Consumption - where contemporary art is exhibited and viewed: measured by contemporary museums, the wider museum base, and biennials and triennials.
Very few cities score strongly across all three of these areas, with New York and London being the clear exceptions. A separate group of more modestly sized cities, San Francisco and Brussels among them, achieve a comparable internal balance at their own scale, suggesting a more realistic strategy for ambitious mid-tier cities than chasing New York's profile.
The report also tracks a new generation of art hubs emerging globally, some sovereign-funded, others driven locally. It concludes that seemingly peripheral cities are significant sites of innovation, not just a talent nursery for the core, forming part of a wider and more inclusive global art world.
This is especially visible in the growing international recognition of artists from outside the established art capitals. African cities had no presence at all in global rankings of leading artists in 2005, but a sustained handful of entrants by the 2020s, concentrated in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Lagos. Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama is cited as a leading example. Rather than relocating to an established art capital, he has built his own institutions in Tamale and been recognised at the Venice Biennale and by major commercial galleries, illustrating how international recognition can now follow artists who remain rooted in place.
Professor Huggins added: "The history of art shows that aesthetic innovation has tended to concentrate in a small number of dominant Western cities, and the literature on artistic careers suggests strong reasons as to why that concentration might persist. Does it still hold? The answer, on the evidence of the World Art Cities Index (WACI) is that it does not, or at least it no longer holds in the same form."
New York and London remain the two largest concentrations of aesthetic capacity in the world, but the fifty-city sample shows a clearly differentiated field beneath them, reflecting a diversity of civic character and creativity.
The full report, including full list of cities, can be found here.
