Ranked lists of the best this and best that – the best movies or best novels or best plays or whatever -- are one of my great guilty pleasures. Those lists are inherently absurd, of course, because judgments about artistic excellence are really not properly subject to democratic quantification, and because different works are like so often apples and oranges.

But that doesn't mean I don't find these lists irresistible.

Like the brand new one out of Britain, generated by a survey of 500 art world muckety-mucks, among them David Hockney, Damien Hirst, the director of London's National Gallery. One reason I like this list is that it doesn't claim to name the “best” pieces of modern painting and sculpture, but the most influential ones, works that had the greatest impact on artists and the world at large. “Influence” is a more objectifiable and ultimately interesting attribute to debate than “greatness.”
 
The overwhelming winner?  Surprisingly, Marcel Duchamp's “Fountain” from 1917, his most famous "readymade," which consists of an ordinary factory-made porcelain urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt.

Now I am very fond of Duchamp, and have enjoyed the work of many Duchampians of the last century. But I understand why, to lots of regular folks as well as some artists and critics, "The Fountain" was the beginning of the end for fine art. Because what Duchamp did by signing and hanging a urinal in an art gallery -- or a hat rack or a bicycle or a comb -- was to give artists ever since license to call anything art, traditional ideas of craft or beauty be damned. And it made a kind of smirking irony a major visual-art sensibility ever since, especially during the last 50 years with Pop Art, conceptual art, and a large fraction of the hottest contemporary work today.
 
In second place on the new most-influential list was Pablo Picasso's cubist masterpiece, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Picasso's angular, edgy portrait of five nudes opened a different 20th century floodgate – the one that replaced more or less realistic depictions of the human form and the real world with the stylized and abstract pictures.
 
Looking over this new survey and ranking, I was reminded of a fascinating recent academic study that divides all modern artists into two different groups. An economist at the University of Chicago found that "revolutionary conceptual innovators," whom he calls "deductive" artists, usually do their most highly prized work when they're young. Duchamp was 30 when he hung the urinal; and Picasso only 26 when he painted "Demoiselles."  Great artists whose work is more about masterful technique, like Matisse, tend to make their masterpieces much later, in their 50s and 60s.
 
And so on this new top-ten list of influence, it's all the enfants terribles' work at the very top of the list – the Duchamp, two Picassos and a Warhol -- with almost all the later bloomers, like Matisse, beneath them.

Proving that in art, you can have your cake and eat it too if you're a revolutionary: you get to rock the world as a youngster and, then after you're dead, become the most respected pillar of the establishment.