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Twenty living, working New Yorkers whose art changed art.
* RICHARD PRINCE
King of appropriation. Didn't stop after inventing or uncovering unknown pictorial conventions deeply embedded in visual culture. Adopting various personae, he's a fountainhead for many artists.
* VITO ACCONCI
The original man in black followed people on city streets, masturbated for a week under a gallery floor, and made some of the more outlandish sculpture of the past fifteen years. Proves that an artist can behave in public exactly as in the studio. For that alone, deserves a MacArthur.
* DAVID HAMMONS
Work involving sticks and stones, hair, found objects, and snow that grabs you by the lapels. Hammons's sculpture has underground cred and a complex beauty. Once said, "I can't stand art, actually. I've never ever liked art... it was never that important to me."
* CINDY SHERMAN
Launched a thousand theories, with a persona so simple that no one has ever come out and said exactly what it is: a woman who likes to shop, bring home clothes, try them on, and take her own picture. This formula, repeated thousands of times over three decades, has shed exactly no light on the real Sherman-and, through some alchemic miracle, tells us just who we think we are.
* MARY HEILMANN
Painter, ceramist, trouper. Makes easy-does-it, smart geometric process paintings, rendered in bright jewel-like colors, their surfaces inflected with touch and nuance. Hermann's work has a...