Just arrived. My thanks to the creators, moderators and contributors here for the unusually intelligent and civil atmosphere of the place.
Though schooled in philosophy (to a point—quit PhD work at Cambridge), I’ve never felt at home there, only driven to it repeatedly by negative elimination as it were; and I’m not at all sure my peculiar ways and interests belong here, so (a) I welcome correction and even gestures to the exit door, if they seem useless, outré or both, and (b) I thought I’d start (and maybe end) with questions.
First, I have a rather far-reaching question, which I hope you’ll forgive me introducing at some length.
I recently came across the New York Times arts feature, ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Classical Music’ (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/06/arts/music/5-minutes-that-will-make-you-love-classical-music.html). They asked 21 classical music aficionados (artists and critics) “What are the five minutes or so — longer than a moment, shorter than a symphony — that you’d play for a friend to convince them to fall in love with classical music?”
Astonishingly (at least to me), in response to this simple and clearly ‘popular’ question, the aficionados overwhelmingly selected relatively obscure and esoteric pieces from 20th and 21st c composers; and even more incredible, not one chose a piece by Bach or Mozart.
Of the 690 comments, a few welcomed the novel soupcons, but most contested and many savaged the list, along the lines of my own astonishment.
This all seemed interesting to me.
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My related but somewhat different question, then, is: What, for you, is the last truly great work (or figure) in the following spheres?
A few suggestions that I hope will help.
1) Feel free to answer on any one or all of the below; beyond curiosity, they’re meant to inform a broader question I’m interested in.
2) This obviously isn’t meant to be an exact or exacting assignation, so (if possible) I’d like to follow the old Aristotelian rule of thumb, to not demand greater precision than the subject naturally allows (thus, for example, to try not to get bogged down in definitions of ‘greatness’). It’s simply meant to mark the place where, for you personally, the tradition of supreme mastery in this praxis—unquestionable and compelling greatness—was still at work.
3) On the other hand, any attempt at explaining why you made the particular pick, would be most welcome.
4) If you think five targets is too unwieldy, I’m happy to break them up, but would love to maintain the synoptic view if possible.

a) Music

b) Visual art
(happy to hear on painting and sculpture separately, and if you think it necessary to go beyond such traditional categories altogether, so be it I guess)

c) Literature

d) Philosophy
(by the process of elimination, I’d say this could include any ‘thinker’)

e) Leadership
(hoping also not to get bogged down in whether great leaders can be ‘evil’; I see no prima facie reason why Hitler or Stalin couldn’t be included here, if one’s personal sense of leadership is value neutral)

For what it’s worth, figure-wise I’d choose Shostakovich, Picasso (though not fond of him), Beckett, Wittgenstein, and Gandhi (or Churchill).