Is the art world a flashy suburb of Wall Street? You might think so, to listen to artists talking among themselves about money and career. Russian oligarchs lavishing millions, personal styles touted as “brands,” the globalization of the marketplace—Have you been to Dubai?—museum curators joining commercial galleries for serious money, art fairs opening tomorrow, auction records set only to be set again. Oh, that bubbly air. That celebrity perfume. Such a shiny-faced world cries out for resistance, but it also begs for something else. A portrait.

In that spirit, Vanity Fair decided to conduct a straw poll. Or maybe it should be called a silk poll. Ask 100 art-world worthies—mainly artists, professors of art, and curators (but not dealers, who must look after their own)—to name whom they consider to be the six most important living artists. Then ask a writer to sketch a portrait of the results. The intent was not to identify once and for all the six most important living artists. No one can know that. The point was to picture contemporary taste and capture the reflection off the sheen of the period. (More Van Dyck, in short, than Rembrandt.) And to ask, as one always does with portraits: Is the dress all that matters? What lies behind moneyed eyes?

And the envelope, please …

The German painter Gerhard Richter is today our most admired living artist, having received 24 votes. Jasper Johns comes next with 20 votes, followed by Richard Serra with 19. Bruce Nauman (17), Cindy Sherman (12), and Ellsworth Kelly (10) complete the top six. John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, William Kentridge, and Ai Weiwei each received five votes. David Hammons, Brice Marden, Ed Ruscha, James Turrell, and Kara Walker received four votes.

A different group of voters, of course, might have picked different artists. (The voter pool selected by the Vanity Fair editors tended toward the older, American, and mainstream.) Of the roughly 100 asked to vote, more than half (54) did so. That’s more than I would have expected. It’s natural not to want to “judge” artists; Mark di Suvero responded by explaining, “I do not believe in ranking artists. Art is for life.” It’s also natural to arch an eyebrow at the low pop appeal of lists. (Jasper Johns offered an elegant demurral, writing “Regrets” on the editor’s invitation to participate in the poll.) But compiling lists can also be a useful parlor game, forcing one to make difficult distinctions and clarify murky values. I admired those with the courage to make a call. Besides, they risked making six friends now—and a thousand enemies forever.

What portrait emerges? There is no single look to the art or common countenance to the sensibility of the artists who top the list, each of whom can be viewed in a variety of ways. But there is a powerful shared preoccupation with, to put it as nakedly as possible, “I.” In a period whose presiding spiritual disease is narcissism, the artists we most admire play, seriously, with what we can know about who we think we are. Me, myself, and I—the modern trinity—has rarely seemed less fixed or certain.

Of the names near the top, I was first intrigued by Serra and Sherman. It’s no surprise Serra did well. He is the world’s most celebrated living sculptor. But he struck me as somehow different from the others. A declarative artist with a dominating and assertive eye—and “I”—Serra was one of only two respondents in the poll to vote for himself. (The other was the New York-based collective known as Bruce High Quality Foundation.) I would have been disappointed if Serra hadn’t voted for himself. He can be subtle but is no pussyfooter, and his monumental scale, masculine bravura, and capture of the space between the dangerous and the fine seem to recall another, less ironic day than our own. The man who made Tilted Arc and Snake seems close to Jackson Pollock and the boys at the Cedar Bar in the 50s. Before a Serra, I imagine Andy Warhol going, “Wowww,” and Roy Lichtenstein painting Pow!