Unpopular Culture: The fine art of staying famous

Somebody, I can't remember who, once rang me up to enquire whether, in my expert opinion, Damien Hirst would still be famous in 300 years' time. To which the expert answer is: goodness knows and, probably, who cares? I mean, 300 years! That is the period within which Vermeer went from being a minor local artist to a totally forgotten artist to one of the supreme masters of the Western tradition. Strange things can happen in 300 years.

But, still, when we think about contemporary art, we do often cast our minds ahead. It is one of the ways we make a judgement, or express a frustration. For instance, I read someone the other day saying that the Chapman Brothers might be an amusing black-comedy act, but their work would obviously be forgotten in 50 years' time.

When you hear things like that, you think, "well, yes, maybe that's right". And how weird that a body of work, which is now so prominent, should just evaporate. But equally, how inevitable. For of course most of today's famous art will prove temporary, sooner or later. It has to, if only to make room for the temporarily famous art of the future.

Actually, you don't need even to think ahead 50 years. Try to get hold of the catalogues for the British Art Show from, say, 1990, 1995 and 2000. This five-yearly exhibition is a fairly accurate record of the artists who have – as the phrase is – just "emerged". See how many names you haven't heard of. They had their moment, but it was brief.

Now, Grayson Perry has curated an exhibition, Unpopular Culture, of works from the Arts Council's sprawling post-war collection, the era "before British art became fashionable". In doing so, he has been drawn to some artists who have been excluded from the "headlines of art history". But what makes one artist fashionable and another unfashionable? Elsewhere on these pages, we ask Britain's top artists to nominate their own neglected heroes of British art, the artists they feel are most under-rated today, thanks to the passing whims of fashion and fame.

However long it takes, fame-loss is a mysterious thing. A rising reputation leaves plenty of evidence in its wake. Exhibitions are held. Reviews are written. Books are published. Reproductions are circulated. Works are sold, and resold, and prices go up. When a reputation sinks, though, it generally sinks without much trace. There may be a decisive turning-point – a show that bombed, a devastatingly destructive review. More often the process consists of negative events, a series of things that might have happened, and didn't. There is the retrospective that was never held. There is the publication in which the artist might have been featured, but wasn't. There are all sorts of unrecorded occasions when the name came up and somebody shook their head. Prices drop, then the work stops coming up for sale. The vanishing is complete.

Why does it happen, in any individual case? You can say genius will out, eventually, and non-genius will in again. But how long is eventually? The 19th century esteemed Guido Reni and Gerrit Dou, to the same degree that we now esteem Caravaggio and Vermeer. And in another 300 years? Even in the short term, the snakes and ladders operate pretty unpredictably. Consider the trajectory of two British artists who, with a normal span of years, would probably both be alive today.

In 1973 the abstract painter Jeremy Moon died in a road accident, aged 39. He was a contemporary of Bridget Riley, at the height of his powers, and he was given a posthumous retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery. And then it all went quiet. Nobody wrote a book about him. He wasn't included in shows that surveyed the art of the 1960s. Most of his work was in storage. I'd never heard of him at all when, in 2001, two young British painters, Daniel Sturgis and Richard Kirwan, organised a touring Moon-rediscovery show.

In 1996 the conceptual sculptor Helen Chadwick died of a heart attack, aged 42. She had recently had a major survey show at the Serpentine Gallery. She was a pioneer of art-based-on-the-artist's-body. There were several books about her. She was one of the leading artists of her generation. But no tribute exhibition followed her death. She wasn't supported by an influential gallery. Her work – feminist, hedonist, intellectual – was perhaps too "brainy", too "classical", for the sensational climate of the day. Chadwick's name fell out of currency, and I hadn't thought of her work for a long time when, in 2004, she was finally given a posthumous retrospective at the Barbican Gallery.

You might conclude that the rule is, if you can possibly help it, and notwithstanding the supposed examples of Mozart, Keats and Van Gogh: don't die young. When an artist stops producing new work, with all the attention that generates, their old work is liable to fall out of view too. But then things may change.

They changed for Moon. His geometrical abstractions are odd, relaxed and witty in a way that suits our current mood, and his revival seems to be going apace.

And was it too soon for Chadwick? I haven't noticed that the Barbican retrospective has made any difference to her standing, and that's bad. Her great works, Ego Geometria Sum and The Oval Court should be on regular view at the Tate. Yes, and perhaps they will one day. But we shouldn't sit back and leave it to posterity to take care of it. Posterity is now.

Unpopular Culture: Grayson Perry selects from the Arts Council Collection opens at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (01424 229111; www.dlwp.com) on 10 May, then tours the country to 3 January 2010 (www.southbankcentre.co.uk)

Today's big names select their fogotten heroes

Grayson Perry

The more I look at the painting After the Meal (1952) by John Smith, the more I like it. He is just one of a whole list of mid-century British artists that I could reel off that anybody with a Sunday afternoon degree in art history wouldn't have heard of. They were good artists but because they were not intellectually audacious and they didn't fit the fashion of the time, they are unpopular. You have to be a real giant to defy the arc of art history in the 20th century. I don't think it's such a bad thing now. Painters like Lucian Freud are very respected and they can exist alongside more fashionable work, but it was more rigid in those days when the "isms" went one after the other, up until the late Seventies. The genre of British post-war figurative art is underrated because it wasn't necessarily in step with the narrative of art history that was so dominant at the time: the rise of abstract expression and the progression into pop art. Smith's work wasn't seen as cutting edge, and therefore he gave it up. He went from passion to empirical experiment. The work he is most famous for was dubbed the kitchen sink school because the artists painted ordinary life and it wasn't seen as modern art. Somebody called them illustrations with passion – but they were the visual art equivalent of films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey; the rise of the working-class voice. Smith hated the "kitchen sink" label and by the early Sixties, he rebelled and was painting experimental abstracts. It was a shame that he didn't carry on but my assumption is that he was beaten down by fashion. After the Meal is typical of his style in that it's a domestic interior with a mother nursing a baby and a child standing at the door.

Mark Wallinger

George Stubbs is perhaps the only classicist that English painting produced in the golden age of landscape painting and his late comparative anatomy work drawings are extraordinary. He just gets lumped in with equestrian art when actually the works are far richer than that. He is not forgotten but he is still lower down in the pecking order than he should be. Art goes in and out of fashion. Even within certain artists' work, notoriety comes at a certain stage of their development that is not necessarily their best. One of my favourite paintings is Miro's The Farm (1921-22), which predates his abstractions. It has a hallucinatory quality. I prefer his earlier work to the later work that everybody associates with Miro. It's like Capital Gold: only one or two hits by artists are played and the rest of the repertoire is ignored.

Martin Creed

The two sculptors Henry Moore and Barry Flanagan are brushed aside as being not relevant despite being commercially successful. People think sculpture is boring. I once heard somebody describe Moore’s sculpture as being the turd in the marketplace – that blobby thing made of bronze that you see everywhere. I really like Moore’s work. Flanagan’s flying bunnies are also everywhere. I think they are beautiful. They get forgotten in the history of art because they are like Starbucks – they’re all over the world so nobody would pick them out as being the best. Sculpture – and particularly civic sculpture – is seen as boring by some people because it is just there, like the trees. Public sculpture is outside the frame of the gallery so it is possibly less entertaining and could even be thought of as annoying as you don’t choose to see it.

Maggi Hambling

I find Roger Hilton’s intense mix of abstraction and figuration never ceases to amaze. I know that Andrew Lambirth’s book came out last year and was a great success and that there have been exhibitions in London and Cornwall. But it seems to be an English disease that an artist such as Hilton or Prunella Clough, among many others, have to die before anyone takes any notice. Perhaps they lived before the age of hype, in which we are now, and in which artists without much talent can be sold to the world. Hilton can hold my attention again and again and I experience something different each time. In 1980 I bought a late gouache by Hilton entitled Two Elephants Fighting. That hung on my wall for three months before I discovered the words, “women and children last”, embedded in it.

Peter Blake

I suppose Colin Self is the artist I’d pick as being brushed aside. He isn’t ignored but he also isn’t assessed properly. People always seem to get him wrong and I think he is a very good artist. Richard Hamilton and I are at least 10 years older than Colin – so it might well be that the situation changes. But for whatever reason, he is not as well known as he should be. An artist’s career is always cyclical – you have an exhibition, get known for a while, then people lose interest and you come back again and people hopefully take notice of you again. There have been times when I’ve been neglected but I kept working and eventually things change back again. There must be people I was at the Royal College with, in a year of 20 painters, who deserve to be better known than they are and simply didn’t become so. That’s the nature of the art business: some make it and some don’t.

Gavin Turk

My neglected heroes are the two British Pop-Artists, Colin Self and Clive Barker, who are relatively well known and had some Pop notoriety but they never made it to the top like Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton did. In Self’s case it was because he wasn’t particularly good at playing the art game. I honestly think that one of the great challenges for artists, certainly in the present climate, is having to present yourself. Perhaps both of these characters weren’t the best at selling themselves. Artists also get brushed aside because fashion changes. I try to be aware that art needs a marketplace and relies on an audience. I’m terribly shy of it, but a necessary part of being an artist is to acknowledge that you have to deal with an audience – not only just showing them your work but on other levels as well.

Dinos Chapman

I think Peter Doig is a neglected artist. He makes very beautiful landscape paintings but he is hugely unfashionable. He has been forced to live in Trinidad because nobody likes his work here! It is not a style that people want to look at. Why? I don’t know because I like his paintings, but it seems nobody else does.

John Hoyland

Patrick Caulfield is certainly underrated if his prices reflect his position in the art world. He painted in very flat, bright, colours – what might be seen as figurative painting at first glance, but was in fact always more interesting than that. William Turnbull is another artist who had a successful career but not many people have heard of him. He is more reticent, spiritual and subtle. The young dealers are very hip on promotion – there is a lot of hype about. In my younger days, the promotion in galleries was when they opened the door. Now you can’t turn around for reading about the same people all the time. Artists in my generation, like Caulfield, had a strong underground following but the people who are really fashionable now depend on publicity. My generation was never seriously promoted. Maybe it’s a good thing; we wouldn’t have welcomed that. I think it would be easier to write about who is overrated than underrated.