YBAs just don't do it for us, say art students

What does Damien Hirst mean to the next generation of young British artists? Not much, according to a new survey from the Art Newspaper. Today's art school students, it reports, are more likely to be inspired by 20th-century masters such as Picasso and Matisse than the YBAs. And their greatest hero of all is a Frenchman: Marcel Duchamp (above), the godfather of conceptualism, who changed the rules in 1917 by exhibiting a urinal in a New York gallery.

Duchamp was the clear winner of a poll that asked art students around the country to name their biggest influences. The results (below right) are surprisingly traditional: household names such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele scored far better than modern art's media darlings. Hirst limped into 19th position, Turner prize-winning potter Grayson Perry came in at 28 (still one better than Rembrandt at 29), and the Chapman brothers shared an ignominious 31st place.

Jonathan Jones, an art critic for the Guardian, welcomes the results, describing them as a wake-up call to galleries. "It shows that people are in touch with traditional ideas of art, but I don't think it's traditional in a boring way," he says. "It's reassuring that students have got their heads screwed on. The artists they've chosen are all real artists. They're passionate."

Of the students' top 10 artists, only three are still alive: Lucian Freud is the highest-placed living artist at number five, followed by Tracey Emin and Bruce Nauman. Emin, the most influential of the YBAs, shares eighth place with the surrealist master Salvador Dalí. "Emin and Dalí represent the desire not to be too tasteful," says Jones. "Excessive good taste is oppressive."

One of the students consulted for the survey said of Emin: "She doesn't care what people say about her. She completely changed my idea of what art can be."