Best of 2003: what were the brightest lights during the past year in art? We asked eleven of our regular contributors to take a look back.

David Rimanelli

(1) Felix Gmelin, Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II (Color Test, The Red Flag II; "Delays and Revolutions," Venice Biennale) Time travel, 2002 to 1968. Gmelin juxtaposed two small-scale, rather intimate projections: one of his father participating in a revolutionary action in Berlin in February 1968 as one of several runners carrying a red flag through the streets and the other a re-creation of the event which the artist staged in Stockholm last year. The action in Berlin culminated with one of the protestors, having gained access to the town hall, emerging with the flag on a balcony; Gmelin's replay omits only this detail, implying that political protest is foreclosed. "Politics" as theme, gesture, and look: The red flags, separated by thirty-plus years, function as nostalgic, seductive, glamorous icons.

(2) Spencer Finch (Postmasters, New York) and Edward Krasinski (Anton Kern Gallery, New York) Conceptualism past and present. Krasinski is a septuagenarian Pole working in a vein reminiscent of Daniel Buren. Knowing that--and that this isn't the work of a clever-clever recent MFA grad--makes some difference in the work's reception. Collectors take note: The hanging mirrors bisected by a blue stripe would look sensational, albeit rather perilous, in a gigantic crazy bathroom. For Eos (dawn, Troy), 2002, the centerpiece of Finch's show, the artist visited the site of the ancient Trojan ruins, wherever they are in the former Asia Minor, and with precise optical instruments determined that, contra Homer, the famous "rosy-fingered dawn" is more of a bluish purplish shade. With ceiling-mounted fluorescent lights wrapped in various colored filters, Finch precisely "re-created" the light in Troy at dawn.

(3) Richard Prince, "Nurse Paintings" (Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York) and Good Life (Glenn Horowitz Bookseller) Camp Nurse. Piney Woods Nurse. Nympho Nurse. Surfing Nurse. Bloody, drippy splatter sampling of AbEx gesturalism. After the disappointment of Prince's last show of joke paintings at Gladstone, these sumptuous canvases were a return to form--smart, cheap, expensive, snide. Dime-store nurse romances also make appearances in Good Life, otherwise Prince's photographic paean to fancy living as reflected by Glenn Horowitz's rare book library (Elsie de Wolfe's Recipes for Successful Dining, Cecil Beaton's diaries, David Hicks's On Living--With Taste), with works from the artist's "Celebrity" series sometimes in the background Bibliomania as photocollage, or in the Prince parlance, "gangs" of books.

(4) "Ellsworth Kelly: Red Green Blue" (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) Organized by Toby Kamps of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, this show was a lovely complement to Kelly's "Tablet" exhibition at the Drawing Center. Sometimes the tedious masters really do deriver the best goods. Like Kelly LeBrock in shampoo commercials of yore, these works seem to implore, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful!"

(5) "Christian Schad and the Neue Sachlichkeit" (Neue Galerie, New York) Weimar Republic dissipation for art lovers who think the Kit Kat Club in the movie Cabaret would be a swell hangout.

(6) 28 Days Later and Spun I saw maybe three movies this year, one of which was The Hours, quite possibly THE WORST FILM I HAVE EVER SEEN. With that in mind, I nominate Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, essentially a dumb zombie movie nonetheless characterized by unusually clever visuals and writing and shock effects that are kind of shocking for real, and Spun, a lurid foray into the world of methamphetamine addicts. The latter the work of Jonas Akerlund, who directed the music video for Madonna's "Ray of Light." Unmistakable stylistic affinities, viz., fast-forwarding, door-slamming, eye-dilating, lucky wucky rhythms. Remember the tripped-out, streaky time-elapsed images of cars racing by and Madonna's herky-jerky dancing in the video? Spun is "Ray of Tweak."

(7) Alison Gingeras's Ass (Artforum, September 2003) This photograph by Piotr Uklariski of Pompidou curator Gingeras's backside and her appended essay excited a fair amount of commentary, some rather spiteful. Who do they think they are, Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis? How much does a three-page "advertorial" in Artforum cost? A pathetic gambit for attention, etc., etc. Pathetic maybe, but obviously successful, based on all the carping. And yes, the photographer and the curator are "intimate"--is that what you wanted spelled out in florid Anais Nin prose?

(8) Zoloft Advertisements Do other people make you feel anxious? Have yon suffered a recent loss of appetite? Do you feel tired or fatigued all the time? You may be suffering from depression, and you may be a sad-faced globular amoeboid. The recent Zoloft campaign is one of the best in the glorious field of pharmaceutical advertisements. A depressed polyp shudders alone in the rain, while normal polyps chat convivially in a group. Under the salutary influence of Zoloft however, depressed polyps suffering from social-anxiety disorder can join the smiling polyps.

(9) Leon Ballista Alberti, Momus (Harvard University Press) Best known for his treatise on perspective, Alberti also penned this highly amusing satirical account of Momus, the "god of fault-finding and the personification of embittered mockery," as editors Sarah Knight and Virginia Brown put it--i.e., the god of criticism. Everybody knows that critics are EVIL (think only of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, Waldo Lydecker in Laura, or Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead).

(10) Overheard at World of Video Two clerks talking about Larry Clark's "punk Picasso" exhibition at Luhring Augustine: "Goin' to see the show tomorrow, supposed to be awesome. West Twenty-fourth Street. All huge galleries with big glass doors. Dude, they've got it all laid out for you."

Artforum contributing editor David Rimanelli teaches art history at New York University. He is the curator of "Women Beware Women," on view at Deitch Projects, New York, through December 20. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

1. Felix Gmelin, Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II (Color Test, The Red Flag II), 2002. Installation view, 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. 2. Spencer Finch, Eos (dawn, Troy), 2002. Installation view, Postmasters, New York, 2002. Edward Krasinski, Untitled, 2001/2003. Installation view, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 2003. 3. Richard Prince, Graduate Nurse, 2002, ink-jet print and acrylic on canvas, 89 x 52". 4. Ellsworth Kelly, Green Blue Red, 1964, oil on canvas, 73 x 100". 5. Christian Schad, Marcella (Marcella Schad), 1926, oil on wood, 31 1/2 x 22 1/2", 6. Danny Boyle, 28 Days Later, 2002, still from a color DV film, 113 minutes. Foreground: Private Clifton (Luke Mably). Background: Private Mailer (Marvin Campbell). 7. Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (GingerAss), 2002, color photograph. 8. Advertisement for Zoloft, 2003. 9. Leon Battista Albetti, Momus, 1443-50 (Harvard University Press, 2003). 10. Larry Clark, Untitled (Threesome), 1980, black-and-white photograph, 19 1/2 x 13". From the series "42nd Street."

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Kate Bush

(1) "The Air Is Blue" (Casa Luis Barragan, Mexico City) Compared with the clutter and chaos of "Utopia Station" at the Venice Biennale, this Hans-Ulrich Obrist curatorial vehicle at architect Luis Barragan's exquisite home in Mexico City was the epitome of restraint. Twenty-seven artists, local and foreign, were invited to respond to the man and his manse. Their interventions in the house were often as intangible as Barragan's own subtle fusions of light, form, and color. Rirkfit Tiravanija got his green Cadillac running, and Cerith Wyn Evans played his record collection on old phonographs. But Lygia Pape's ethereal web of golden threads strung across the light-flooded studio and Anri Sala's photograph of a white horse impaled on a shiny steel column best apotheosized Barragan's visionary conjunctions of nature and modernism.

(2) "Cruel and Tender" (Tate Modern, London) Tate's first-ever photography exhibition, curated by Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski, was authoritative, comprehensive, and exhaustively researched, h traced the tradition of rigorously observed, artistically ungarnished photography, bequeathed from August Sander to Walker Evans, onto Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank in the '50s, and resting, in the present day, with Rineke Dijkstra and Paul Graham. The exhibition was particularly lucid in describing the relationship between the Dusseldorf triumvirate (Gursky, Struth, Ruff) and the US landscapists who preceded them (Shore, Robert Adams, Baltz). Great documentary photography doesn't just illustrate the world indexically but articulates meaning in it, and this exhibition provided an object lesson for the myriad young photographers and video makers currently appropriating the raw aesthetics rather than the philosophical or political substance of the documentary mode.

(3) Laban (Herzog & de Meuron) Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's Laban dance center deservedly scooped the 2003 Stirling Architecture Prize. Adjoining a muddy, litter-strewn creek in bleakest South East London, the unpretentious, gently curved rectangular building sets the area alight. Laban's facade, formed from see-through plastic infused with color, becomes by day an iridescent skin that shimmers in the changing sunlight and flickers with the haft-visible movements of the dancers inside. As darkness falls, the structure transforms into a giant lantern, spilling gorgeous hues onto the wasteland.

(6) Boris Mikhailov (Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland) Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov had been relatively unsung in the West before Scale's publication of his magnum opus, Case History, in 1999. Winterthur's retrospective thoroughly excavated Mikhailov's thirty-year career and its unique vision of a humanity shaped, stamped, and shattered by the ineluctable forces of history. The artist's oeuvre swings between Rabelaisian burlesque and Dostoyevskian tragedy. With his friend Ilya Kabakov, Mikhailov is surely one of the Eastern bloc's most compelling artists--and one of the world's greatest living photographers.

(5) Ossie Clark (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) and Judith Watt, Ossie Clark, 1965-74 (V&A Publications) In 1970, Ossie Clark was king of the King's Road, and Mick Jagger strutted in one of the designer's gold leather jumpsuits. The V&A's miniretrospective, as impeccably tailored as one of Ossie's slithery python-skin jackets, reminded one of a time when fashion was about art rather than money. The midiskirts and maxicoats, the bias-cut dresses and sheer chiffons--realized in wife and muse Celia Birtwell's joyous, effusive prints--still look astoundingly contemporary, but maybe that's because Clark's been recycled by everyone from Marc Jacobs to Prada.

(6) Jake and Dines Chapman (Modern Art Oxford) Another eventful year for the Chapman brothers and their tireless crusade against reactionary values and limp liberalism. The Oxford show made its centerpiece Insult to Injury, 2003, a defaced--or in Chapmanspeak, "rectified"--original set of Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings. Juvenile pranksters or radical provocateurs? It's hard to be certain, but the Chapmans' energetic combination of craftsmanship and showmanship could well convert a--many would say belated--Turner Prize nomination into establishment accolade.

(7) City of God The breakneck speed of its opening sequence--with beating drum, sharpened knife, and careering chicken--set the pace of this extraordinary gangster movie, directed by Fernando Meirelles, which tells the story of a group of teenagers living in Rio's favelas during the '60s and '70s and follows the collapse of their society into violent, drug-fueled anarchy. Its visceral visuals deliver the most distinctive cinematographic style since Christopher Doyle's work for Wong Kar-wai.

(8) Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project (Tate Modern) You can't help but gasp as you descend into the Turbine Hall, its cavernous space dissolved in a wafting mist, a giant sun glowing at its far end. It's an illusion, conjured from no more than a mirrored ceiling, some puffs of smoke, and some two hundred yellow sodium lamps. Yet if the magic of the piece fades quickly, its radiant pleasures, in the gathering fall, linger on.

(9) Arnold Odermatt, Karambolage (Steidl) and "Ce qui arrive" (Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain) A book of car-crash photographs by Swiss traffic cop Arnold Odermatt joined Paul Virilio's exhibition to make "the accident" a refrain this year. Some were outraged that Virilio curated 9/11 into his Ballardian "museum of accidents." Yet if we redefine the accident as not a chance event but a predictable side effect of technological, social, and political "progress," then the philosophical terrain shifts. The paradoxical lesson of these tragedies is that they are always inevitable--and always avoidable.

(10) David Blaine He was starving--for forty-four days, sealed in a Perspex box suspended thirty feet in the air from a huge crane on the bank of the Thames. But the real spectacle was the Great British Public's refusal to be impressed by a man apparently willing to die for no loftier cause than self-promotion. As one commentator noted, Why didn't Blaine attempt a true feat of endurance ... like following the Hutton inquiry?

Kate Bush is Senior programmer at the Photographers' Gallery, London, where she recently organized concurrent exhibitions on the work of Kyoichi T-suzuki and Martin Weber.

1. Anri Sala, No Batten, No Cry, 2002, color photograph, 23 5/8 x 30". 2. Rineke Dijkstra, Forte de Casa, May 20, 2000, color photograph, 49 5/8 X 42 1/8". 3. Herzog & de Mouton, Laban, 2003, London. Photo: Merlin Hendy and Martyn Rose. 4. Boris Mikhailov, untitled, n.d., color photograph, 7 1/8 x 11 7/8". From the series "Red, USSR, 1968-75." 5. Ossie Clark with Gala and unidentified model, New York, ca. 1974. Photo: Celia Birtwell Archive. 6. lake and Dinos Chapman, The Rape of Creativity, 2003. Installation view, Modern Art Oxford. Photo: Steve White. 7. Fernando Meirelles, City of God, 2002, still from a color film in 35 mm, 130 minutes. 8. Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Installation view, Tate Modern, London. Photo: Jens Ziehe. 9. Top: Jem Cohen, Little Flags, 2000, still from a Super-8 film, 6 minutes. From "Ce qui arrive." Arnold Odermatt, Buochs, 1957, black-and-white photograph. 10. David Blaine, Above the Below, 2003. Performance view, London. Photo: Andi Southam.

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Robert Rosenblum

(1) "Art Deco 1910-1939" (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) As time travel back to the World of Tomorrow, this theatrical tour de force digs up the lost and giddy civilization of our modernist roots, a Machine Age fantasy covering everything from cigarette lighters to Busby Berkeley film clips. Leger and Brancusi make brief appearances, too, looking even more at home next to Chanel and Rolls-Royce than they do in MOMA'S pantheon. And the global reach of Art Deco couldn't be more topical, with over-the-top items from India, Mexico, China ... Whether culled from factories or Aztec ornament, this total environment of zigzagging geometries also sounds a death knell for our long infatuation with Art Nouveau's vinelike grip. Hail now the right angle and the clean slate!

(2) Damien Hirst, Armageddon (Gagosian Gallery, New York) The dark side of this old-fashioned vision of utopia is Hirst's Apocalypse Now. From a safe distance, the nine-by-twelve-foot monochrome expanse of bluish black might be mistaken for a branch off Serra's tree; but up close, it turns out to be a carpet formed by a nightmare infinity of dead flies, preserved for eternity as our civilization's hideous tombstone. This may be the scariest prediction yet of the whimper, not the bang.

(3) Ellsworth Kelly, Ground Zero As for postapocalyptic resurrection, Kelly's ultra-green project for the WTC site couldn't be more rejuvenating. At once a vast burial mound, some thirty feet high, and a verdant pasture of awesome dimensions and simplicity, Kelly's plan not only distills everything that need be said about life and death but adds a new Central Park where Manhattan most needs it. Of course, real-estate speculators and architects may not see things this way.

(4) The Murakami Empire Murakami keeps upping the ante with his international invasion of signature products. London families rushed to the Serpentine to see the post-Disney outdoor sculpture that announced his show. And the Rockefeller Center installation, with its Buddha-like "Mr. Pointy" and its opportunity to sit on magic mushrooms in a superflat universe, was competition even for Koons's happy-making Puppy, which once presided there. Murakami's franchise has put smiles too on both the luxury-market accessories he created for Louis Vuitton as well as on their black-market, populist rip-offs that turn up from Canal Street to Seoul.

(5) Patricia Cronin, Memorial to a Marriage (Woodlawn Cemetery, New York) Henry James might wince, were he to see this pathbreaking update to what he called "the white, marmorean flock." After total immersion in nineteenth-century tomb sculpture, with an ear to the gossip about a colony of American lesbian sculptors who chiseled neoclassic nudes in Rome, Cronin resurrected these fantasies in a fresh offering to the supernatural: a monument to herself and her lover, the painter Deborah Kass, entwined like Victorian babes-in-the-wood. The supine half-naked bodies and classical draperies transcend mortal fact to become a lesbian Liebestod. Even more amazing is that this project found a home not in Woodstock but in Woodlawn, side by side with the tombs of all those straight, wealthy, tight-laced WASPS.

(6) "Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne" (Philadelphia Museum of Art) A perfect capsule history of modernism versus postmodernism, Michael Taylor's scholarly survey of de Chirico's six-decade fascination with the classical Ariadne marble set up a seesawing balance between what used to be considered the great early de Chirico and the late charlatan who made had copies of his glory days. But contemporary attitudes, propelled by Warhol's de Chiricos, replication art, and revisionist rebellions, may have shifted the sands, so that Part II might even look much cooler than Part I But why choose?

(7) Saatchi Gallery (London) As for new museums, it's tonic to see what can be done not with a warehouse or a factory but with a right-wing example of Edwardian architecture. In 1908, the barely known Ralph Knott won the competition for the County Hall building that has long reigned with stodgy, imperial grandeur on London's South Bank. And now, its abundance of nee-Georgian columns, pediments, and molding has been renovated by RHWL and invaded by wild young Brits. Both the airy central spaces and the rows of small private chambers house everything hot, from Hirst to Emin, but they also include an overdue revival of the 1950s Kitchen Sink School. The clash of rebellious art and traditional containers makes everything seem newborn. Patrons of future art museums should take a long, hard look.

(8) Paul McCarthy (Hauser & Wirth, London) The same collision of Edwardian anti-modernism and twenty-first-century counterculture can be found in Hauser & Wirth's brand-new gallery in Piccadilly, where Sir Edwin Lutyens's Midland Bank (1922), renovated by Annabelle Selldorf, has been inaugurated with a show that would have made the architect of the British empire call out the Royal Guards. McCarthy's mayhem, with its kindergarten chaos of hacking and smearing, of blood, guts, and chocolate syrup in industrial quantities, reaches new heights here. Trashing Lutyens's interior from top to bottom, this all-consuming installation is like an id with a bulldozer.

(9) Jenny Saville (Gagosian Gallery, New York) For those who think painting has died again, here's the spirit of Rubens resurrecting it at hurricane force. Saville's giant, in-your-face nudes make you feel like Gulliver, fording rivers and climbing mountains of British flesh. Both invigorating and repellent, overscaled and minutely mapped, these monumental canvases reinvent art's most venerable theme, the human body.

(10) Picasso: The Classical Period" (C&M Arts, New York) Anybody who ever thought Picasso's dalliance with antique sculpture was a retrograde cop-out should pause before this ravishing anthology of ancient Galateas transformed by Picasso's Pygmalion. Not only are they visually extraordinary, with their complex back-and-forth between classical ideals and Cubist compressions and distortions, but their overt serenities are often fraught with such petrified anxieties that we sense they must conceal the artist's own psychodramas. And John Richardson's catalogue essay is crammed with so many new facts and ideas that our reading of these years may have to start from scratch.

Artforum contributing editor Robert Rosenblum is professor of fine art at New York University and a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. His traveling exhibition "Citizens and Kings: Portraiture in the Age of Goya and David" is currently on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Photo; Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

1. Cigarette lighter designed by Art Metal Works for Ronson Lighter Company, ca. 1925. 2. Damien Hirst, Armageddon (detail), 2002, house flies on canvas, 9 x 12'. 3. Ellsworth Kelly, Ground Zero, 2003, collage on newsprint. 12 1/2 x 14 1/2". 4. Takashi Murakami, "Reversed Double Helix," 2003. Installation view. Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo: Tom Powel. 5. Patricia Cronin, Memorial to a Marriage, 2000-2002. Installation view, Woodlawn Cemetery, New York. 6. Giorgio de Chirico, Ariadne, 1913, oil and graphite on canvas, 53 3/8 x 71". 7. Saatchi Gallery, London, 2003. Foreground: Mini Cooper customized by Damien Hirst. 8. Paul McCarthy, Piccadilly Circus, 2003, still from a color video. 9. Jenny Saville, Pause, 2003, oil on canvas, 10 x 7'. 10. View of "Picasso: The Classical Period," C&M Arts, New York, 2003.

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Chrissie Iles

(1) Michael Heizer, North, East, South, West (Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY) Heizer's key work, only partially constructed in the Nevada desert in 1967, is now for the first time fully installed, indoors, at Dia:Beacon. Four negative volumes cast in steel and sunk in the ground, these large, dark, enclosing forms are both protective and forbidding. This is radical sculpture: uncompromising, direct, clear, profoundly corporeal, provoking a strong urge to climb in. A compass for large sculpture, North, East, South, West led directly to Heizer's seminal Double Negative, 1969-70. Dia director Michael Govan's commitment to its full realization has raised the bar for museums everywhere.

(2) Richard Prince, Second House In an isolated spot in the Catskills, Richard Prince has gutted a small house with garage and clad the outside in silver insulation panels, rewriting the concept of installation. New "Hood" paintings, evoking Judd's early wall works, hang in three white rooms. (Another "Hood" painting, set on a plywood cube, is parked in the garage.) In the living room, a table displays 3rd Place, 1986--a double-sided portrait of Sid Vicious--and rare ephemera from Woodstock. Outside a window, a 1973 Dodge Barracuda, custom painted in gray, sits in the backyard. The view from inside becomes part of the installation, locating Second House somewhere between artwork, film set, and the uncanny domestic space of spiritual America.

(3) Jung Hee Choi, Rice (MELA Foundation Dream House, New York) This video-sound work was presented in May at Dream House, the permanent installation of La Monte Young's atonal music and Marian Zazeela's magenta lights, and one of Dia founder Heiner Friedrich's other great legacies. A hypnotic projection of rotating mandalic forms radiated out from Zazeela's magenta color field like silent fireworks, while the sound of Choi tracing a circle around the top of an overturned cooking pot with a rice paddle created a single repeating tone that resonated deep in the solar plexus.

(4) The Wrong Gallery (New York) Art will always remain vital if artists take matters into their own hands. The Wrong Gallery is little more than a recessed doorway in Chelsea, but founders Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick present a terrific series of succinct shows, including an early painting by Elizabeth Peyton and Untitled (Closed) by Adam McEwen, whose deadpan pieces are ones to watch next year.

(5) "Ballpoint Inklings" (K.S. Art, New York) An ode to the humble ballpoint pen, this clever exhibition showed the huge range of possibilities the instrument can produce, from James Siena's delicate latticed lines to Jonathan Lerman's rock-band portraits and Suzanne McClelland's Sugar Daddy, in which skeins of lines form words like spun sugar.

(6) John Latham (South London Gallery) Latham, one of Britain's most important living artists, showed a piece this year in "Independence: Issues with a Contemporary Relevance," a London group exhibition. One would have loved to have seen more of him--a retrospective in New York would be the perfect counterpoint to the upcoming Dieter Roth show at MOMA QNS. Latham's "One Second Drawings," 1970-75, in which spray paint seems almost breathed onto panels, are conceptual gems and, like all his work, have been a huge influence on my thinking for as long as I've been a curator.

(7) Banks Violette The highly worked black, white, and silver surfaces of Violette's drawings, seen in several Chelsea shows this year, belie the emotional angst of his subjects: teenage gangs, rock 'n' roll suicide, juvenile delinquents. Symbols from Motorhead album covers and X-ray images of skulls and galloping white horses are rendered in smooth graphite drawings. Brooding black enamel sculptural forms--a broken drum kit, for example--evoke the dark side of the heavy-metal American dream.

(8) The Robert Beck Memorial Cinema (New York) In a blacked-out room on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, film lovers gather every Tuesday night at approximately nine. The projector whirs from a makeshift balcony, curator Bradley Eros introduces the program, and films by young and unexpected filmmakers are screened. One recent highlight: an expanded cinema presentation by Bruce McClure, whose multiple abstract color film-loop projections are overlaid and diffused into one another like a moving Rothko. Along with Ocularis, RBMC is one of the most innovative film venues in New York.

(9) Schaulager (Munchenstein/Basel) With Schaulager, the first museum devoted as much to the study of artworks in open storage as to exhibitions, Herzog & de Meuron have achieved a rare thing: museum architecture that takes proper account of the art. Five floors of spacious rooms house the Hoffmann Collection, which curators, conservators, and scholars can view in a gallery environment, Downstairs, the temporary Dieter Roth retrospective and Robert Gober's permanently installed Untitled, 1995-97, were essential viewing. The presentation of Gober's piece is exemplary: Behind a bolted Madonna, water cascades down a staircase and reappears in underground grottoes, where one glimpses seaweed, rock, shells, and four wax legs through two grids in the floor. In addition to the Schaulager's opening, the summer in Switzerland was rich with a great cluster of shows in Zurich, by Doug Aitken, Brice Marden, and Ugo Rondinone, among others.

(10) Catherine Sullivan, 'Tis Pity She's a Fluxus Whore (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT) Sullivan's double-screen installation re-creates two controversial historic theatrical performances in their original sites--but with the locations reversed. The same actor performs extracts from Jacobean playwright John Ford's drama about incest, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, which appeared at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1943, at the site of the 1964 Fluxus festival in Aachen, Germany; in turn, Fluxus actions from the festival are reenacted in the Wadsworth's theater. Through its rupturing, theatrical artifice is doubled in a compelling fusion of performance and installation.

Chrissie Iles is curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and co-organizer of the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

1. Michael Heizer, North, East, South, West, 1967/ 2002. Installation view, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY, 2003. Photo: Stephanie Berger. 2. Richard Prince, Second House, 2003, color photograph, 20 x 24". 3. Jung Hee Choi, Rice, 2003. Installation view, MELA Dream House, New York. 4. Adam McEwen, Untitled (Closed), 2002-2003. Installation view, The Wrong Gallery, New York, 2003. Photo: Jason Nocito. 5. Suzanne McClelland, Sugar Caddy, 2003, ballpoint pen on paper, 9 x 10% 6. John Latham with Painting with Tennis Ball Marks, Riverside Studios, London, 1990. 7. Banks Violette, Spook City U.S.A., 2003, graphite on paper, 22 x 30". 8. Poster for the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, 2003. 9. Herzog & de Meuron, Schaulager, 2003, Munchenstein/Basel, Switzerland. Photo: Adrian Fritschi. 10. Catherine Sullivan, 'Tis Pity She's a Fluxus Whore, 2003. Installation view, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT.

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Daniel Birnbaum

(1) Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project (Tate Modern, London) This synthetic heliocentric cosmos is no doubt the artwork of the year. Activating the space itself and involving the viewer both as a perceiving subject and as a body among bodies (when I went to the Tate, hundreds of people were on the floor, looking themselves in the mirror on the ceiling), Eliasson's installation reaffirms that great art can be popular. A cultic space without a hint of New Age kitsch, his transformed Turbine Hall is majestic, even--dare I say it?--sublime.

(2) Mrs, Kabakov's Underwear In a city like Moscow, where buildings are torn down overnight and new ones sprout up in their place, little remains constant. In fact, I found only one thing: a peculiar lamp, which 1 first noticed when I went to the Moscow House of Photography to see a show about Ilya Kabakov and his circle. In the photographs and video documentation assembled to honor the artist on his seventieth birthday, one recognized the n, key protagonists, Joseph Backstein, Boris Groys, Vadim Sakharov--and that lamp, which, as it turns out, was made from a typically Russian undergarment, a silky slip that belonged to Vicki Kabakov, the artist's ex-wife. A few hours later I visited Moscow's Institute of Contemporary Art, located in Kabakov's former studio on the top floor of an old building, and there I stumbled upon the real thing. The strange-looking fixture has been hanging above Kabakov (now the ICA's) table since the early '70s and s was at the center of the most profound debates about Russian Conceptualism. There it remains unharmed by time and the shifting political wind May it stay forever!

(3) "Andy Warhol's Time Capsules" (Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt) Smart than everyone else, Warhol has extended his fifteen minutes considerably. He even began a second life recently in Frankfurt, thanks to the Museum fur Moderne Kunst's selection of some dozen time capsules on display for the very first time. His second coming may look a lot like the first, but I couldn't stop poring over all the letters and postcards and stuff Warhol collected For an artist who likened his mind to a tape recorder equipped only with an erase button, this is a strangely Proustian project.

(4) Ayse Erkmen's Animals She has worked with real tigers and even tried to restage the MGM lion's famous roar (with help from a beast in the Berlin zoo); now Erkmen has turned her attention to taxidermic specimens. In "Cuckoo," her exhibition at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, a half-dozen automated animals--a stuffed zebra, lioness, pronghorn, black gnu, etc.--performed a mechanical dance, like zoological clockwork.

(5) Rodney Graham (K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf) I like everything about Graham: the installations, the films, the books, the album covers, and the music. Thanks to the large midcareer survey at Dusseldorfs K21, I now see how it all fits together. The idea of a circular narrative structure plays out in an entertaining way in the three loops Vexation Island, 1997, How I Became a Ramblin' Man, 1999, and City Self/Country Self, 2000. In the last, I'm very fond of the dandy who kicks the peasant's ass (and I can't get over his peculiar shoes). The epitome of lovely, pretentious urbanity!

(6) Simon Starling Through his displacements of cacti, cars, and rhododendrons across Europe, Starling creates entirely new geographies, presented most recently in Nice and Venice. One very small step for the understanding of transportation, nationality, and travels--but a major leap forward for sculpture.

(7) Critical Curators Although the role the curator in recent years has eclipsed that of the critic--and at times even that of the artist--it's nonetheless rare to come across a curatorial idea that rises above cliche. Maurizio Bortolotti's well-researched study Il critico come curatore (Silvana Editoriale) reminds one of the truly original thinking that informed the work of curators like Pierre Restany, who died this summer, and the early Harald Szeemann. But curatorial I. sophistication is still apparent on occasion: Boris Groys's ongoing exhibition of Soviet-era art at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, "Dream Factory Communism," is a recent example. Fully in line with his provocative writings, Groys offers up a kind of visual essay about totalitarianism, art, and propaganda, full of traps and political paradoxes. Here things are never only what they seem to be.

(8) Two Monstrous Tomes This year I succumbed to two exceptionally big books: Thomas Hirschhorn's recent special edition for the magazine Texte zur Kunst--a roughly 30 x 20 x 3" version of Deleuze and Guattari's Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?--is a somewhat overstated homage to the philosophical duo and perhaps a kind of low-budget continuation of his recent monuments to other thinkers (Spinoza, Bataille). The giant volume looked so bizarre in the hands of the artist that I had to order two copies immediately. And then there's Hans-Ulrich Obrist's thousand-page Interviews: Volume I (Charta), a compendium of conversations that the curator conducted with sixty-six artists, curators, filmmakers, writers, architects, philosophers, etc.--from Vito Acconci to Brian Eno to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Volumes 2, 3, and 4, please!

(9) Carl Michael von Hausswolff Subversive to the core, the Swedish sound artist now systematically devotes his attention to important precursors like Brion Gysin (von Hausswolff recently curated a show of the self-taught sound poet's work, at Stockholm's Fargfabriken), the occult scientist Friedrich Jurgenssen, and, rumor has it, the obscure Swedish inventor of the letter bomb.

(10) Francis Picabia (Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) In a year marred by horrible painting shows all over Europe promoting new figurative art of the most embarrassing kind, it was good to see the real thing--i.e., large parts of Picabia's oeuvre beautifully installed by Suzanne Page and Gerard Audinet et al. in collaboration with Swiss art duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. A totally self-effacing touch. Discreet, Swiss, perfect.

Artforum contributing editor Daniel Birnbaum is director of the Stadelschule art academy in Frankfurt, cofounded its new institute for art criticism, and heads its Portikus gallery. Photo: Ulf Lundin.

1. Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Installation view, Tare Modern, London. Photo: Jens Ziehe. 2. Hanging lamp In Ilya Kabakov's former studio, Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow 2003. 3. Andy Warthol, Time Capsule 44 (detail), ca. 1973, collection of ephemera from ca. 1890-1973. 4. Ayre Erkmen, "Cuckoo," 2003. Installation view, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, 5. Rodney Graham, City Self/Country Self, 2000. Production still Photo: Scott Livingstone. 6. Simon Starling, Island for Weeds, 2003. Installation view, Scottish pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale. 7. Erik Bulatov, Sonnenau odor Sonnenuntergang (Sunrise or Sunset), 1989. oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 78 3/4" From "Dream Factory: Communism," 8. Thomas Hirschhorn with his special edition of Qu'est-ce qua la phllosophie? (Texte zur Kunst, 2003). 9. Brion Gysin and Carl Mlchael von Hausswolff, 1982. Photo: Ulrich Hillebrand. 10. View of "Francis Picabia," Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2003. Photo: Andre Morin.

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Thelma Golden

(1) The Blackout Because it was not tinged--predictions notwithstanding--with death, disaster, or even looting, the blackout of August 2003 offered New Yorkers the most profoundly moving experience of the year. Anxiety exertion, exhaustion, heat, silence, suspense, and relief all converged to create a day, night, and day of sheer visceral response. In retrospect it felt like what we often want (and are left wanting) from art and life. Forget all the feel-good news stories of nice neighbors and the "spirit" of the city. The blackout worked us. Like nothing in the art world has in a long, long time.

(2) David Hammons (Ace Gallery, New York) When the announcement arrived, it was clear this show could be everything or nothing. Everything being the mega-retrospective we've been praying for over the decade-plus since "Rousing the Rubble." Or nothing as in nothing. Nada. Hammons, being the master of extremes of course made it both. In the dark, we moved around with our blue lights, looking for what we were supposed to look at, unable to find it. Just able to feel it--Hammons's grand, sublime gesture. We still feel it. And we remain grateful.

(3) David Adjaye, The Dirty House London-based architect David Adjaye is known in the art world for his collaborations with artist (his red, black, and green kaleidoscope skylight atop Chris Ofili's British pavilion was one of the best things in Venice) and for the homes he has designed for artists. Completed late last year for Tim Noble and Sue Webster, the Dirty House--a converted turn-of-the-century timber factory in East London--is pure Adjaye. From the master of fusing outer skin and inner soul comes an unassuming facade graced with a hovering whir roof that just hints at the luxurious, functional, beautifully bespoke spaces within.

(4) Curators of the Year This year we lost two of the greats: Dorothy Miller, my first curatorial role model, and Kirk Varnedoe, who was ant remains an exemplar to us all. I am thankful, too, to Elisabeth Sussman, for her brilliant Eva Hess] and Diane Arbus retrospectives, and to Nancy Specter, for her Matthew Barney tour de force.

(5) Dia:Beacon Opening Reception Growing up in southeast Queens, there were no openings or receptions, Dinner dances, weddings bar mitzvahs, fund-raisers, retirement parties--they were all called "affairs." We all agree that Dia:Beacon is a phenomenal achievement. Here my vote for the opening. From the train procession up the Hudson to the leisurely cocktails in the sunny Robert Irwin garden to the magnificent dinner in that gorgeous, vast hall--for those moments, the art world felt like an actual community. As my mother would say, with equal parts pretentious Francophilia and South Shore twang, "Oh, what a wonderful affair."

(6) Like a Virgin With a nod to the revirgination movement sweeping contemporary evangelical Christianity, here's praise for several midcareer artists whose shows made me feel the way I felt when I saw their work for the very first time: Janine Antoni at Luhring Augustine, Isaac Julien at the Bohen Foundation, Donald Moffett at Marianne Boesky, Zoe Leonard at Paula Cooper, Do-Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin (all in New York), and Doug Aitken at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. And seeing the work of newcomers Dario Robleto and Kori Newkirk (at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria and The Project, respectively) suggested that in ten years I might be revirginized all over again.

(7) Making the Band 2 (MTV) Gary Simmons told me there's been no significant hip-hop made in the past five years. MTB2, MTV's hip-hop talent search hosted by P. Diddy, says he's right. These contestants don't want to be rappers, they want to be famous. And because they're on MTB2, they are famous so they no longer have to be talented. PD keep, telling them, "We're makin' history, baby!" And they buy it. And this makes for great TV.

(8) Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family (Scribner) Subtitled "Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx," LeBlanc's epic volume is a stunning account of two young women and the failing schools, unplanned pregnancies, homelessness, baby mamas, correctional facilities, drugs, and welfare-to-work that make up their lives. Forget thinking that any of these issues can even begin to be addressed by an artwork or a benefit. Here is the crazy, unbelievable, sad story of our world right now, written so beautifully it would be s easy to mistake for a novel. LeBlanc, with quiet force, relentlessly reminds you it's not.

(9) "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) I almost didn't go see it, in which case I would now be doing a Jayson Blair, but because I knew I'd want to rant about it, I went. As I suspected, it was a "love the message/hate the messenger," or more aptly, "love the quilts/hate the exhibition," kind of thing. Of course I loved the quilts. We all know the quilts are brilliant and beautiful. I just wish the quilters were making a little more money for all their brilliance!) I like the old black ladies. My mother is an old black lady. I hope to become an old black lady. I just hated the exhibition, which, with its shockingly politically correct tone, under the transparent cover of high/low intervention and demolished media categories, was the most culturally repugnant, retrograde moment I have experienced, perhaps in my entire professional life. It reminded me of reading Huck Finn in seventh grade at my all-white private school. I didn't hate Huck Finn, I just hated having to talk about it with everyone else as they had their racial revelatory moment. Then again, I suppose in one way I did love the exhibition--it was an exercise so obvious, so over-the-top, that perhaps it will serve as a warning and never be repeated.

(10) Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, The Phantom Project (The Kitchen, New York) So many of our collective cultural references are to things we've never seen. So it was thrilling to see the film, video, and photographs of seminal early works--many of them known only by reputation--presented at this twentieth-anniversary performance. Unlike a retrospective of paintings, Jones observed, this live/archival hybrid, in which today's dancers performed with yesterday's ghosts, made the past new and the present come alive.

Thelma Golden is deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem. where she is currently organizing "HarlemWorld: Metropolis as Metaphor," which opens next month. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

1. Commuters on the Manhattan Bridge, New York, August 14, 2003. Photo: Kate Lacey. 2. David Hammons, Concerto in Black and Blue, 2003. Installation view, Ace Gallery, New York. 3. David Adjaye, Dirty House, 2003. London. 4 Dorothy Miller, ca. 1932, Photo: Soichi Sunami. 5. Dia:Beacon opening reception, Beacon NY, 2003. Photo: Adriana Groisman. 6. Left: isaac Julian, Paradise Omeros, 2002. Installation view, Bohen Foundation. New York, 2003. Right: Dado Robleto, I Wanna Rock My Little Honda Across the Universe, 2000-2001, homemade crystals, 50,O00-yea-old meteorite fragment, ground amino acids, vinyl from the Beatles' "Across the Universe" record, antique metal-and-glass syringe. rust, spray paint, piaster. and polyester resin, ca. 54 x :18 x 18% From the series "Popular Hymns Will Sustain Us All (End It All)." 2000-2001. 7. The cast of Making the Band 2 with P. Diddy. Photo: Zsolt Sarvary. 8. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family (Scribner, 2003). 9. The quilters of Gee's Bend at the opening of "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002. 10. Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, The Phantom Project, 2003. Performance view, The Kitchen, New York. Left to right: Bill T. Jones, Ayo Janeen Jackson, and Germaul Yusef Barnes. Photo: Richard Termine.

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Pamela M. Lee

(1) Marine Hugonnier, Ariana (Venice Biennale) In the hothouse laboratory that was "Utopia Station," French-born, London-based artist Marine Hugonnier's 2003 film Ariana, a spare, poetic meditation on a trip to Kabul, might now be read as a fitting riposte to the blague and bombast of the "embedded" reporting of America's other unfinished war. In attempting--and failing--to film a panoramic view of the city Hugonnier assembled footage that was quotidian where mainstream media images of Kabul were traumatic, and reflective where others were reactive. Ariana represents a frustrated geography less of the non-Western other than of Hugonnier's own perspective and culture.

(2) Philip Guston (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) As myth would have it, Philip Guston abandoned abstraction because, as the artist himself once wrote, he was "sick and tired of all that Purity." But what could be more "pure"--at least to this Gustonphile--than the outsize eyeballs, immobilized limbs, and nervous fingers that populate his late work? As Michael Auping's traveling retrospective (originally organized for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) so persuasively demonstrated, Guston could endow a shade pull with as much affective purity as graced the skittish, anxious pinks of his abstract canvases.

(3) Himalayas: An Aesthetic Adventure" (Art Institute of Chicago) The title of this exhibition of devotional art from India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal, and Tibet (organized by visiting curator Pratapaditya Pal and the AIC's exhibition coordinator, Betty Seid) makes me wonder if some museum bureaucrat was hoping to capitalize on the Discovery Channel's recent penchant for everything Everest. Cheesy name notwithstanding, this show's lucid presentation of the densely layered, even obsessive worlds of Hindu and Buddhist art from the sixth through the nineteenth century was a transformative museum experience.

(4) Chris Ware, Quimby the Mouse (Fantagraphics Books) Following on his triump with Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, 2000) comes cartoonist Chris Ware's latest graphic novel, Quimby the Mouse, his anxiously awaited collection of ... student efforts. If that makes you think Ware (one of the only bright notes to a rather dismal 2002 Whitney Biennial) might be coasting (or capitalizing) on his relative celebrity, think again: His hapless tales of a bipolar Mickey-like character are resplendently baroque--far more complex, structured, and spacious than your average multichannel digital-video installation. Neo-McLuhanites sounding the death knell of print culture take note: Chris Ware has revitalized the space of the page in the postmedium era.

(5) The Weather Underground Bill Siegel and Sam Green's terrific documentary on the Weathermen, the ultraradical splinter faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, perfectly illustrates the truism that one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Some would call this a lesson in moral relativism, but the sickness of recent foreign and domestic policy may bring us closer to an understanding of the Weathermen's rage than we might ultimately like

(6) Jocelyn Robert, The State of the Union Robert, a Canadian new-media artist and musician who divides his time between Quebec and the Bay Area, won the New Image award at the 2002 Transmediale festival in Berlin with his video installation L'Invention des Animaux, 2001, in which an airplane is made to sound and behave like a bird that has just flown the nest. With 2003's State of the Union, Robert takes inspiration from a passage in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, playing war-film footage in reverse. While some of Robert's work is an uncanny digest of postwar experimental cinema--one thinks of Michael Snow, with whom he has collaborated, or Ernie Gehr--his crossed taxonomies and inverted worlds suggest a peculiar brand of contemporary neorealism.

(7) Adobe Books (The Mission, San Francisco) Adobe Books is your typical shambling mess of an independent bookstore--the anti-Borders--that also happens to put on some of the most provocative shows of art in the city. But the real attraction here may be the artlessness of the space itself: The gulf between literary and visual pursuits isn't bridged in a gesture of faux rapprochement; rather, the two are allowed to coexist as distinctly autonomous entities. At a time when museums and galleries are often more aesthetic and spectacular than the objects they showcase, Adobe Books' Back Room takes an aggressively nonaesthetie stance that respects art by granting it the space to be different.

(8) Richard Prince My favorite rhetorical question of the last two years may be more of a whine than an interrogative: "Why do they hate us?" many of our American brothers and sisters have been heard to exclaim. Perhaps the reason why "they" hate "us" is precisely because "we" ask such questions in the first place. Enter Richard Prince, whose canonical Marlboro Man images are seductive demonstrations of the pathologies of American consumption. At last summer's Venice Biennale, where Francesco Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum installed the series beautifully (in the Italian pavilion's "Delays and Revolutions"), those cowboys looked more urgent and vital than they have in a very long time indeed.

(9) Johnny Cash, "Hurt" (video by Mark Romanek) I could easily extol the Bay Area's outpouring of diverse non-garage-revival music in 2003: The art damage noise of Deerhoof or Erase Errata; the minimalist techno of Kit Clayton; and the lachrymose twang of the Court and Spark. But it's sadly fitting to pay tribute to the Man in Black this year, and all the more so because Mark Romanek's video for "Hurt"--an improbably moving cover of the Nine Inch Nails song--was so rich in its southern -gothic-by-way-of-Netherlandish-vanitas imagery. Very MTV of me, perhaps, but few cinematic images of 2003 had the staying power of that video's last frames, when Cash closed his piano's keylid with a quiet and fatal decisiveness.

(10) Burning Man (Black Rock Desert, Nevada) Because San Francisco empties out that weekend and you can find a parking space.

Pamela M. Lee is associate professor of art history at Stanford University. She is currently completing Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, forthcoming from MIT Press early next year.

1. Marine Hugonnier, Ariana, 2003, still from a color film in 16 mm, 18 minutes 36 seconds. 2. Philip Guston, By the Window, 1969, oil on canvas, 78 x 81". 3. Sculpture of Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi, Nepal, late fourteenth century, copper with gilding and semi-precious stones, 16 1/8" high. 4. Chris Ware, frames from Quimby the Mouse. 5. Bill Siegel and Sam Green, The Weather Underground, 2003, still from a color film in 35 mm, 92 minutes. 6. Jocelyn Robert, The State of the Union (detail), 2003, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. 7. Adobe Books, San Francisco, 2003. Photo: Andrew McKinley. 8. Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 2000, color photograph, 48 x 76 3/4". 9. Johnny Cash, "Hurt," 2003, still from a music video by Mark Remanek. 10. Burning Man festival, Black Rock Desert, Nevada Photo: Steve Saroff.

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Tom Vanderbilt

(1) Marko Home and Mika Taanila, eds., Futuro: Tomorrow's House from Yesterday (Desura) Finnish architect Matti Suuronen's pill-shaped Future went from helicopter-delivered fiberglass "after-ski cabin" to icon of the emergent, plastic-as-pornography space age. The "leisure house," as the promotional literature would have it, was wrapped by Christo, posed in by Warhol, purposed as an Ai Force recruitment station in California, and nearly bought en masse by the Soviet Union in a bid for cold-war cultural supremacy. The book, with its enclosed DVD documentary, is an elegiac postcard from an architectural future lost to history.

(2) Los Angeles Plays Itself This monumental documentary, directed by Them Andersen, takes an obvious conceit--"Los Angeles is the most photographed place in the world"--and follows it, with stunning rigor, to its logical conclusion: a picture of the city composed entirely of its pictures. Andersen leaves no reel unspun as he mines fiction for its "documentary revelation," presenting filming-location histories of places like Bunker Hill, which Hollywood shot when it was a heir flophouse district and, later, when it was a clear corporate simulacrum, and all but ignored in between. Andersen rescues a human glance like Kent MacKenzie's overlooked 1961 The Exiles from that almost lost time. Do not miss.

(3) IESI PA Bethlehem Landfill (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) I've gazed upon the submerged Spiral Jetty, driven a 4x4 to reach Double Negative, and hunted down the Sun Tunnels, but the most ambitious, provocative piece of land art I've stood upon recently is this evolving hill--projected altitude, 670 feet above sea level--of municipal solid waste, to which the city of New York adds some 550 tons of garbage a day. The terraced, polyethylene-lined Caterpillar-crushed landmass is hard by the now-defunct works of Bethlehem Steel, smokestacks elegiacally dormant, the growing mound a symbol of consumption's triumph over production.

(4) Carnivale Title Sequence (HBO) Los Angeles effects shop A52 has produced the year's lushest title extravaganza, a Manichaean historical whirligig that takes the mythic surfaces of tarot cards as its departure point for a stereoscopic, inferno-powered plunge down a digitized rabbit hole, where florid landscapes turn into grainy, haunting archival looks at dust-bowl Okies, a fulminating Mussolini, and a demagogic Stalin.

(5) www.americasarmy.com The DoD has its own digital battle models (SimNet), and Marines train on Doom. In a curious yet inevitable synthesis, the Army has now transformed its own operations into proprietary video-game entertaimnent. A fascinating blog here, written by a soldier/game developer from frontline Afghanistan who is gathering data for the simulation, contains observations like, "I think we [should] also think about putting one of those warlord mudbrick compounds in our future releases. That should be a pretty cool map, don't you think?" Today's geopolitical quagmire, tomorrow's first person shooter.

(6) Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City (Ace Books) Crackerjack sci-fi conjuring an extraplanetary future, post--"melding plague," in which machine-built, domed cities literally absorb the body politic: "When we buried the dead they kept growing, spreading together, fusing with the city's architecture." I read this on the terrace of my villa at the almost deserted Biosphere 2, in Oracle, Arizona, the self-contained artificial environment designed as a template for space colonization, and I had to keep wresting myself back to reality amid the eerie desert silence.

(7) Second Hand Stories (PBS) Design history, like history itself, is usually told by the winners; the country's thrift stores, on the other hand, that surplus after-empire of American abundance, are usually filled with losers. Christopher Wilcha and John Freyer, traveling via an ambulance they bought on eBay, reconstruct the histories of objects that may or may not have changed the world: Sid Sackson-designed board games, Herb Alpert records, prototypes of wayward inventions. It's as if Alan Lomax launched a recovery mission of polyester-age relics.

(8) Cai Guo-Qiang Weeks before the artist's spectacular, if flawed, incendiary display in Central Park, I saw Cat igniting "gunpowder drawings" at the Grucci family's fireworks compound on Long Island. It was thrilling work, rendering beauty from violent combustion, pairing the most fragile and destructively capricious of media--paper and fire. The scattered, squat concrete buildings of Grucci's evoked for me nuclear weapons bunkers in the desert West, which seemed fitting, not only because Cai has done work at the Nevada Test Site, but because Grucci in the 1950s helped create pyrotechnic simulations of atomic weapons.

(9) "A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture" (Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York) 1 In a revelatory show originally censored by the Israeli Association of United Architects, Eyal Weizman and Raft Segal, using the master plans of Israeli West Bank settlements as well as CIA and other satellite imagery, mapped a terrain of sprawl as subjugation. In mountaintops "captured" by carefully planned settlements, each in view of the other (panopticon-like, as Weizman describes it), and transportation linkages such as elevated superhighways bisecting--and yet avoiding--the Palestianian territories in between and below, Weizman finds an insidious exercise of "sovereignty in three dimensions."

(10) Richard Barnes Usually noted for his architectural photography, Barnes has lately cast his eye on a different architecture, the nineteenth-century art and science of animal skeletal display. He has spent much of/he past year rummaging through archives and natural history museums, photographing forgotten, dusty "exploded view" anatomy constructions, tracking down the obscure purveyors (historical and current) of a lost art. Barnes's photographs, which will be exhibited at San Francisco's Hosfelt Gallery and Henry Urbach Architecture in New York in February, compellingly capture the strange fetishization and implicit materiality inherent in the aggregate collection of these natural-industrial totems.

New York-based writer Tom Vanderbilt is the author, most recently, of Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002).

1. Plate from Future: Tomorrow's House from Yesterday(Desura, 2003) 2. Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003, still from a color video, 169 minutes. 3. IESI PA Bethlehem Landfill, Bethlehem, PA, 2003, Photo: Tom Vanderbilt. 4. Frame from title sequence of Carnivale. Design: A52. 5. Screen capture from www.americasarmy.com. 6. Alastair Reynolds, Chasm City (Ace Books, paperback. 2003). 7. Still from Second Hand Stories, 2003. John Freyer. 8. Cai Guo-Qiang making a "gunpowder drawing" in preparation for Light Cycle, Fireworks by Grucci compound, Brookhaven, NY, 2003. 9. Milutin Labudovic, Nahliel, Ramallah Region, 2002, color photograph, 22 x 33". 10. Richard Barnes, Carnegie, Ape, 2002, black-and white photograph, 25 x 15".

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Isabelle Graw

(1) Francis Picabia (Musee d'Art Modern de la Ville de Paris) For me, painting is interesting only if it shows an awareness of its own sheer meaninglessness and ridiculous claims. This well-curated exhibition demonstrated how Picabia not only reacted to the artistic conventions around him (Impressionism and Cubism, for instance) but also effectively changed their direction. The show's ambition was to present the "whole" Picabia, revealing how each of the artist's "turns" was about communicating with his peers as much as taking a unique position as a cultural producer. My favorite works are the mechanical drawings, which represent, as far as I know, the first reconciliation between automatism and expression.

(2) Galerie Meerrettich (Berlin) Run by artist Josef Strau, the Galerie Meerrettich is housed in a small pavilion set next to the Volksbuhne, the hippest theater in Berlin. Since its repurposing in late 2002 (the building was once the theater's ticket booth), many fine shows have been staged here, each engaging the space in unexpected ways. In January Josephine Pryde added a wall, on each side of which she hung a photograph of a multi, headed hen--a kind of exercise in anachronistic montage techniques. The hen seemed to stare at you, providing the space itself with an uncanny gaze. Jutta Koether's summer intervention was equally successful--the gallery was divided this time with curtains of gold and silver streamers, behind which hung a painting showing traces of a face with huge eyes. After the opening, Koether led us to the Royal Pawn Shop bar to hear the girl band Cobra Killer. The gig was intense (much red wine was poured) and very brief.

(3) Giorgio Agamben, Die kommende Gemeinschaft (Merve Verlag) Published in English in 1993 under the title The Coming Community and issued just this year in German this small book by Italy's most prominent contemporary philosopher offers a challenging reflection on a modus vivendi that accepts the fact that one is foreign to oneself (Uneigentlichkeit). In essence, the coming human being lacks self-mastery. As artists ,are often expected to be in control, to produce a lot, and to "deliver" on time, it seems advisable to consider not mastering the situation and not delivering, and to integrate this stance into one's production.

(4) Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle Without a doubt, the most "artsy" movie I've seen in a long time--every shot more extreme than the last, self-consciously over the top, making fun of its excessive effects, sometimes even betraying its rudimentary Photoshop technique Most unforgettable is the beachfront face-off between Demi Moore and Cameron Diaz, a battle between two historical types--the lonely fighter of the '80s who wears red lipstick (Moore versus the contemporary "team player" girls who wear lip gloss. Both options present problems: The lonely fighter tends to overestimate her exceptionality, while the team-girls conform too much to neoliberal calls for "networking" and "flexibility."

(5) Cosima von Bonin (Galerie Neu, Berlin) Entering the exhibition space, one found a sculpture consisting of two swinging doors that opened onto a kind of tiny, claustrophobic changing room often found in boutiques. This temporary construction commented not only o the boutiquelike situation of many galleries but also on this space in particular, with its bright lights and shiny floor. When paintings are presented here, they tend to evaporate; not so with yon Bonin's huge fabric works, which proved that an artist can pursue her own idiosyncratic language even under the glare of commerce.

(6) Madonna, American Life (Warner Brothers) Possibly Madonna's most underestimated record. The German critics who called it boring overlooked at least three great songs: "Hollywood," "Mother and Father," and "I'm So Stupid," which experiments with neo-punk gestures. When Madonna sings "I," she makes it sound as annoying as egocentrism really is. Sure, she pulled the anti-Bush video from the MTV playlist at the last minute, and her makeover machine occasionally goes into overdrive, as with her recent Deitch Projects show or her children's book. But my sympathy for Madonna is steadfast.

(7) Heimo Zobernig (K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf) Abandoning chronology, the third installment (after Vienna and Basel) of the Austrian artist's midcareer retrospective was the most successful. As always, Zobernig used what he found: in this case 3 set of wooden constructions left in the space from a previous Rodney Graham exhibition, which served as mounts for Zobernig's geometric paintings. Some elements of Zobernig's former installations were rearranged, others reconstructed--always in a playful way that signaled how different it all could have been.

(8) Dogville No filmmaker since Hitchcock has illuminated his leading actress so well--Lars 1 yon Trier's Nicole Kidman is constantly aglow. With its Brechtian setup, Dogville is formally ambitious, visually exciting, and wonderfully scripted: a complex investigation into the fatal consequences of absolute devotion.

(9) Apartment (Berlin) At the Prada and Gucci palaces on Berlin's Kudamm and Friedrich-strasse, you rarely see any customers. The reason is simple: Few Berliners can afford Prada or Gucci. Apartment, a boutique that reopened last summer in a new space in Berlin-Mitte, takes a different approach. From the outside, it looks like all the neighboring empty storefronts. There's no sign: Only a few designer names written on a white wall give it away. For fashionistas with a taste for the laid-back, this basement grotto is the place to be (if you can find it, that is).

(10) Miss Kittin (Amnesia, Ibiza, Aug. 18) Invited by German techno veteran Sven Vath to his weekly "Cocoon Club," Geneva DJ Miss Kittin spun a set that was wide-ranging, precisely conceived, and infinitely surprising. Switching smoothly between different genres--electronica, techno, and Chicago house--and occasionally singing herself, Miss Kittin kept us dancing euphorically late into the night.

Isabelle Graw, founding editor of Texte zur Kunst, professor of art theory at the Stadelschule art academy in Frankfurt and cofounder of its new Institute for Art Criticism. She Is the author of Die bessere Halfte (The Better Half; Dumont, 2003), a study on twentieth-century women artists.

1. Francis Picabla, Tableau Rastadada, 1920, collage on paper, 7 1/2 X 6 5/8". 2. Jutta Koether, Desire Is War, 2003, Installation view, Galerie Meerrettich, Berlin. Photo; Josef Strau. 3. Giorgio Agamben, Die kommende Gemeinschaft (The Coming Community) (Metre Verlag. 2003). 4. Joseph McGinty Nichol Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, 2003, still from a color film in 35 ram, 106 minutes. Natalie Cook (Cameron Diaz) and Madison Lee (Demi Moore), 5. View of "Cosima von Bonin: Fat, Female, Forty, Fade," Galerie Neu, Berlin, 2003. 6. Madonna, American Life (Warner Brothers, 2003). 7. View "Helmo Zobernig," K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, 2003. 8. Lars von Trier, Dogville, 2003, still from a color DV film, 117 minutes. Grace (Nicole Kidman). 9. Apartment, Berlin, 2003.10. Miss Kittin. Photo: Thierry van Dort.

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Martin Herbert

(1) Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Gentlemen (Tate Britain, London) "You ain't even impressed no more, you're used to it," raps Marshall Mathers. It's getting that way with Payne and Relph, who predictably stomped their moribund neighbors in this year's Tate Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary British Art. So, reality check. They may have bitten much style from Mark Leckey, Harmony Korine, and Charles Baudelaire, but Gentlemen, 2003--drifting footage of decrepit London toilets, sportive pigeons, and shimmering glitter, frosted with Morse-code bleeps and a voice-over that's the bitterest, campiest bitch slap of default shallowness you're likely to hear any time soon--was another instance of Payne and Relph saying, in effect, "It's not like that, it's like this," and being absolutely correct.

(2) Jane and Louise Wilson, A Free and Anonymous Monument (BALTIC, Gateshead, England) An almost comically effective deployment of video's kinesthetic potential: Shown in a series of exploded chambers formed by projection screens hung horizontally and vertically, the Wilsons' footage of decrepit modernist relics like Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion (1963-70); a North Sea oil rig; and gleaming, space-age silicon-chip factories wasn't exactly there to be looked at. What mattered was the artists' constant Steadicam panning and tracking over these man-made environments so that pasts and futures--specifically those of the Northeast of England--moved in your peripheral vision like the pistons of some giant, inexorable machine.

(3) Martin Westwood (The Approach, London) The subjects of Westwood's collages (suited-up gents shaking hands, drones shuffling maple leaves on glass-topped tables, and unlikely frissons between men and shop girls) could almost have been pulled from corporate brochures. His aesthetic, though, is something else: Figures are complexly spray-painted, via stencils, onto layers of paper, themselves X-Acto-knifed into explosive, overlapping floral designs and held onto bulletin boards by pretty sprays of colorful map pins. There's a latent critique of big business in this fragile facture, but Westwood seems interested mostly in reflecting romance's potential to manifest itself, like dandelions bursting through cracked pavements, in the unlikeliest places.

(4) Milena Dragicevic, Reconstruction Isn't Easy (IBID Projects, London) There's probably a straightforward reason why Dragicevic painted this chalky, almost illustrational image of a blond accordionist (chiseled chin, Alice band, lascivious glint in the eye) who suggests Rutger Hauer in drag and whose enigmatic presence is reflected in a mirror: something to do with Eastern European folk traditions gone schizoid under capitalism, perhaps. But if you know, don't tell me--I'd prefer Mrs. Hauer to continue disturbing my dreams.

(5) Conrad Shawcross (Entwistle, London) When not driving around London in a Ford Capri fitted with external hooks for catching airborne souls, this class-of-'01 Slade MFA makes works such as those in his extraordinarily confident debut: Including a room-filling loom that slowly created a length of multicolored yam twisted into the form of a double helix (the slow generation of DNA's form was intended, according to the artist, to represent the shape of time), "The Nervous Systems" heralded the arrival of a geek-art wunderkind who lacks the embarrassment gene.

(6) "Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight: The John Hinde Butlin's Photographs" (Photographers' Gallery, London) These photographs, taken by commercial photographers (the Dublin-based John Hinde Studio) in the 1960s and '70s to be turned into gaudy postcards publicizing Butlin's, the UK's best-known holiday camp, were here blown up to gallery scale at the behest of photographer Martin Parr and dearly revealed the cracks in the forced-entertaimnent center's shiny facade: Views of parents gulping down martinis in the bar while miserable nurses chased their feral offspring around the rumpus room said it all. Wallow in kitsch decor and then progress to the black heart of these images for a swift erasure of any lingering nostalgia for repressed Old Blighty.

(7) "Extra Art" (ICA, London) Subtitled "A Survey of Artists' Ephemera" and mostly comprising lovingly preserved private-view cards and mail art from 1960 to 1999, Steven Leiber's pet project wasn't just an oblique retrospect of all our yesterdays; its model of transubstantiation was also a damn good excuse for me not to clear out my loft: Post-"Extra Art," hapless hoarders were suddenly archivists. Don't touch that trunk!

(8) Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Name any biennale and, if Gonzalez-Foerster is in it, you know you're guaranteed at least one oasis of ambient intelligence. At Lyon and Valencia this year, her enveloping installations--computer-generated flash-forwards into a world of stuttering pinprick lights, butterfly-flutter electronica, and abstract shapes arcing across boundless space--appeared just when the jostling for attention of so many strident practices was melting my brain and, for all their posthuman caveats, went down like crushed-ice margaritas. If I was supposed to be thinking about relational aesthetics, I can only apologize.

(9) Janet Cardiff, Forty Part Motet (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London) and Hans Op de Beeck, My Brother's Gardens (Hales Gallery, London) Typical. You wait years for one artwork that acts as a handmaiden to Thomas Tallis's lapidary sixteenth-century chorale Spem in Allure--and then two come along in short succession. Cardiff's widely shown piece from 2001 (which finally arrived in London) enclosed the viewer/listener within a magic circle of loudspeakers, each dedicated to one chorister, and conjured an uncanny, spectral ensemble; Belgian melancholic Op de Beeck used the same music to elevate the animated centerpiece--130 cross-fading drawings featuring ornamental gardens--of his opiated but aching 2003 video My Brother's Gardens. Each was uniquely deliquescent, although the English composer's shade might well query the billing.

(10) Damien Hirst (White Cube, London) Solely for the art-megastar fringe benefits: Private view like a free festival; the first instance I've seen (though maybe 1 don't get out enough) of a commercial gallery selling posters of the show; and a sign outside a bar around the corner from White Cube asking, "Got a Damien Thirst?"

A regular contributor to Artforum, Martin Herbert is a writer and critic based in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. He is currently researching the changing status and iconographic properties of artists' signatures. Photo: Rosalind Furness.

1. Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Gentlemen, 2003, still from a color video, 25 minutes. 2. Jane and Louise Wilson, A Fee and Anonymous Monument, 2003. Installation view, BALTIC, Gateshead, England, 2003. Photo: Jerry Hardman-Jones. 3. Martin Westwood, Pressed Flower, 2003, acrylic on newsprint, vinyl stickers, and pins in walnut frame, 39 x 52". 4. Milena Dragicevic, Reconstruction Isn't Easy, 2002, oil on linen, 47 1/4 x 63 3/4". 5. Conrad Shawcross, The Nervous Systems, 2002, Installation view, Entwistle, London, 2003. B. Elmar Ludwig, Butlin's Ayr, Lounge Bar and Indoor Heated Pool (Ground Level), ca. 1970, color photograph. 7. Ed Ruscha, Ed Ruscha Says Goodbye to College Joys, 1966, offset lithograph, 10 1/2 x 10 1/2". Published as an advertisement in Artforum, January 1967. 8. Dominique Gonzalez. Foerster, Exotourisme, 2002, still from a video and sound installation. From the Bienal de Valencia, 2003. 9. Top: Hans Op de Beeck, My Brother's Gardens, 2003, still from an animated video. 35 minutes. Bottom: Janet Cardiff, Forty Part Motet, 2001. Installation view, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2003. 10. Damien Hirst, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, 1994-2003. Installation view, White Cube, London. Photo: Harry Chambers.

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Bruce Hainley

(1) Philip Guston (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) A lot of what got me excited this year annoyed many. Most. Almost everyone. (E.g., Liz Phair's Liz Phair, which is a totally great CD and, not taking away any of its heart, I'd argue, a conceptual project that posits: What songs should today's pop stars sing? Imagine sappy John Mayer crooning Phair's "H.W.C.") But let me start with something unimpeachably killer: the Guston retrospective, elegantly, brilliantly curated by Michael Auping (of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where the show originated)--thorough but not tiring, and organized to reveal a heretofore almost unthinkable career-long continuity. Some critics wondered how Guston would rank against the heavy hitters (Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, etc.). They found out: Unfathomably sad, joyous, ugly, and rapturous, Custon's as good as it gets.

(2) Larry Clark, punk Picasso (AKA Editions in association with Roth Horowitz) Yikes, the Luhring Augustine show took such a beating. Why? Was it because Clark displayed too large a range of emotions, drives, and desires--from braggadocio, self-centeredness, and suicidal, drug-induced derangement to intense, pseudoexploitative voyeurism, rank humor, and a willingness to be wrong, tendered with, well, flashes of love (i.e., family values)--for aesthetic comfort? Fuck, that's in the job description of any artist worth his or her salt. One of the first texts in his astounding and fittingly dark, American book, on which much of the show was based, puts it this way, paraphrasing William Blake: "Better to strangle the infant in the crib than nurse unacted desires." Clark has been and remains one of the few artists to explore what such a radical idea might look like. The result's not pretty or safe or easy or kind, but then culture isn't Sunday school.

(3) Maureen Gallace (Dallas Museum of Art; 303 Gallery, New York; Maureen Paley Interim Art, London) So much contemporary painting looks silly compared with Gallace's. In her first museum survey and two of the most bracing gallery shows of the year, she provided moody, heartbreaking wonder, as if Morandi and Bill Owens had collaborated to make works freaked with psychic turmoil hut even more with solace.

(4) The O.C. (Fox) Ryan Atwood (beefy, sleepy-eyed Benjamin McKenzie), the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, is taken home by public defender Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher in the role of his career) to live in an ocean-view mansion built by Cohen's real-estate tycoon wife, Kirsten (Kelly Rowan). Ryan gets to live in the pool house and have an adorable, wisecracking, slim-hipped, skateboarding brother, Seth (fetching Adam Brody). I won't even get into the quasi-incestuous homoerotics of it all; I can only hope it continues to live up to its Douglas Sirk-on-ecstasy promise.

(5) Lisa Lapinski (Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles) The Vienna show was billed as a collaboration between sculptor Lapinski and fawned-over video artist Catherine Sullivan (whose ersatz Brechtianism is in dire need of help from Allan Carr, if he can be summoned from his shallow grave, or at least from Wade Robson), but it was more like a two-person show. Lapinski's work highlighted that she's the one who's generous with her brilliance, providing new thought about what sculpture might be. Vienna was merely the warm-up for her LA solo return engagement. Like some distant relative of Wittgenstein, Helio Oiticica, and a less metallic Cady Noland, Lapinski arranges objects sometimes made of plaster, resin, wood, and glass, along with glitter and silk screens (not to mention tautologies and diagrammatic portraiture), which baffle and then--happily, melancholically--move one to tears.

(6) Katie Grinnan (ACME, Los Angeles; The Project, Los Angeles) Trippy, haunted, and weird, with photography as its fundament, Grinnan's second solo show pushed her concerns of photographic and actual spatiality to richer, trickier ends. She then went on to take the prize in a lovely group show, curated by Katie Brennan, at the Project, with a huge, wacky sculptural affair that used a guitar as its inspiration and became something cyclonic, a white vortex where sound shaped space.

(7) Tomma Abts (The Wrong Gallery, New York) and Mamie Holst (Feature Inc., New York) Knockouts. I marvel at Abts's paintings' sculptural subtlety and dazzling play of color; it's super to see a single picture hanging in New York's most inescapable gallery. Hoist gazed into the void in black, gray, and white paint on boxy canvases. I'm convinced Abts and Hoist explore the same vortices and quietudes and appear so different only because of lineage, as though the former had studied with Anni Albers and the latter with Forrest Bess.

(8) Frederick Seidel, The Cosmos Trilogy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) It would be too easy to call him our Dante, although certainly this trilogy amounts to his Divine Comedy, but run backward, ending in hell. He's one of the greatest poets working anywhere--his Cosmos is as delicately virulent, brutal, and cinematically prepossessing as Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, but in writing.

(9) Outkast, "Hey Ya!" (video by Bryan Barber) Note the video by Barber for Andre 3000's first single, "Hey Ya!," particularly the lawn jockey-attired backup trio, the Love Haters, played, like everyone else in the Beatles-on-Ed Sullivan-inspired band, by Dre himself. Need I even mention how much smarter Barber's work is compared with most art video, how it offers a potent reminder that an acknowledgment and a critique of history don't have to preclude glee, which is the unadulterated mood and sound of this entire glorious spectacle?

(10) John Tremblay (Paula Cooper Gallery, New York) and Sherrie Levine (Paula Cooper Gallery; Skarstedt Fine Art, New York) Tremblay's "squircles" of silver and fluorescent colors hum beautifully; it's as if Steve Reich made pop songs with paint. Levine showed her great big "Knot" paintings and a suite of shiny skulls, in addition to an eye-popping survey of early paintings uptown at Skarstedt. But it was her four sculptures in brassy bronze, crystal, and black glass that thrilled me most: a Disneyish dwarf--Happy?--not quite the same four times, the two pairs called Avant-Garde and Kitsch and Repetition and Difference. Well, exactly.

Los Angeles-based Artforum contributing editor Bruce Hainley teaches in the masters of fine arts program at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Art--A Sex Book, his collaboration with John Waters, was published by Thames Hudson in October.

1. Philip Guston, Untitled (Head), 1980, acrylic and ink on paper, 20 x 30". 2. Larry Clark, "Tiffany ... oooooh you're cute!" (Spread of Tiffany for CHEAP DATE), 2002, color photograph, 13 x 19 1/2". 3. Maureen Gallace, Lake House, 2002, oil on linen, 10 x 10". 4. The cast of The O.C., 2003. 5. Lisa Lapinski and Catherine Sullivan, Speech Model from "The Flies", 2003. Installation view, Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna, 6. Katie Grinnan, Jackpot Guitar (detail), 2003, mixed media, 9' x 11' x 12' 4". 7. Left: Tomma Abts, Obbe, 2003, acrylic and oil on canvas, 15 x 18 7/8". Right: Mamie Holst, Landscape Before Dying (Fated #2), 2003, acrylic on canvas, 23 x 23". 8. Frederick Seidel, The Cosmos Trilogy (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2003). 9. Outkast, "Hey Ya!," 2003, still from a music video by Bryan Barber. 10. Left: Sherrie Levine, Repetition and Difference, 2002, black glass, 6 3/4 x 3 1/2 x 2 1/2"; cast bronze, 6 1/4 x 3 1/4 x 2 1/2". Right: John Tremblay, Wizards of Krylon, 2002, acrylic and paint pen on canvas, 66 x 88".

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