Best of 2004: 13 critics curators look at the year in art.

Alison M. Gingeras

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1 Jonathan Horowitz's Art Engage The world has changed since Sartre coined the notion of l'art engage, but a constellation of Horowitz works from the past few years offers the most convincing and poignant incarnation of "engaged" art today. A few examples: a glittery Rainbow American Flag for Jasper in the Style of the Artist's Boyfriend; Official Portrait of George W. Bush Available for Free from the White House Hung Upside Down; talking without thinking (in the state of George W. Bush c. 1980, i.e., drunk and coked-up); Portrait of Chrissie Hynde (I Hope the Muslims Win). And then there are the Minimalist Plexiglas "Contribution Cubes" (think Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube [1962-65] with a money slot), which sport the logos of organizations such as the Democratic National Committee and Greenpeace. These works maintain an incredibly satisfying balance of visual force and deeply relevant yet humorous content, without the demagogic trappings that make most of today's self-styled political art rather unbearable. Given the devastating results of the American election, Horowitz's presence is all the more crucial.

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2 Pawel Althamer (Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht) While "Drunk vs. Stoned" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise at Passerby in New York was one of the best group show titles (and concepts) of 2004, it would have been a better subtitle for Althamer's solo exhibition in Maastricht. He prepared his show in situ with the help of his two teenage sons and their friends--a motley crew of troubled youth from Warsaw's housing projects--who took advantage of Holland's liberal social mores to create several works while both drunk and stoned. Angry, utterly vulgar, brutally funny graffiti covered the walls of some of the galleries, along with other, more "conventional," works. The writing on the walls by these young New Europeans was celebrated and fetishized by the bourgeois patrons of one of Holland's most pristine museums. A perfect encapsulation of the recently expanded European Union.

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3 Richard Prince's Gender Studies Flipping through the twin artist's books Women (Regen Projects, Los Angeles) and Man (Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich) should provide an instant cure for anyone still suffering from a bad case of the politically correct '90s.

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4 "Nach Kippenberger" (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven) Even for the Kippenberger aficionado, this well-curated retrospective delivered rarities, surprises, and an eclectic orgy of delights. Focusing on the architectural tropes in his oeuvre, the show included major installations such as Spiderman Atelier, 1996, Memorial of the Good Old Time, 1987, and the 1985 series of sculptures and paintings "Rest Homes for Mothers," as well as an almost exhaustive presentation of Kippenberger's infamous self-promoting/self-mocking exhibition posters. As artist Lucy McKenzie concludes in her superb catalogue contribution, "[Kippenberger] shows that letting dissidence have dissonance is as powerful as anything overtly political."

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5 Guy Bourdin (Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris) Many people are familiar with Bourdin's oeuvre without even knowing it. This show proves that a recent flurry of high-profile rip-offs--such as Madonna and Jean-Baptiste Mondino's obvious plagiary for her "Hollywood" video--have not succeeded in banalizing the significance of this maverick (fashion) photographer. This show and accompanying catalogue (with an outstanding essay by Rosetta Brooks) give Bourdin his posthumous due as a master of composition, a luscious colorist, a social iconoclast, and an accomplished shoe fetishist.

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6 Franz West: Scatological Humor as Public Sculpture (Public Art Fund at Lincoln Center, New York) Made of roughly welded aluminum and painted in an eclectic palette of yellow, pink, blue, and green, West's gang of seven monumental sculptures served as a perfect foil for the modernist austerity of Philip Johnson's New York State Theater. Viewers of all ages were beckoned to crawl, lounge, and perch on these lumpy, intestine-shaped objects. A crowd-pleaser with polymorphous punch.

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7 Anthony Burdin (Frieze Art Fair Music Program, London) Far from the wheeling and dealing of Regent's Park, Showroom Kook (aka Burdin) delivered the most riveting live show in recent memory. His "voodoo vocals"--Burdin's term for his practice of singing over his own pre-recorded songs--entranced the crowd with his striking voice, psychedelic instrumentals, and autistic stage presence. Not to be confused with run-of-the-mill karaoke, Burdin channels the acute social observations and sense of alienation that animate his visual practice into his stage act.

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8 "Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance" (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) Curated by Geoffrey Batchen, this exhibition (along with its scholarly publication) presented a fascinating and meticulous selection of embellished photographic objects from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that have until now escaped mainstream photographic history. Scouring attics, flea markets, historical society archives, and junk shops around the world, Batchen has thrown light on various vernacular practices--weaving the hair of departed loved ones into the frames of their pictures--that enhance the emotional and mnemonic power of ordinary photographs. These beautiful objects bear witness to the age-old struggle to spare photography's subjects from oblivion. Thinking outside the box, Batchen once again combines an innovative curatorial practice with a provocative brand of art-historical writing.

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9 Jerry Saltz, "The Super Paradigm" (The Village Voice, Sept. 10, 2004) Sometimes Saltz really hits the nail on the head. We are living in the era of a "super paradigm." So-called termite art, new figuration, neo-abstraction, the political, the apolitical, the lo-fi, and the overproduced happily coexist and are "equally" considered. Saltz is right to bemoan the promiscuous consensus that reigns supreme (even if he is guilty of perpetuating it), and his musings raise some important questions: Where are the auteurs when we need some critical and curatorial conviction? Who's afraid of gravitas? Was it fear of breaking consensus that made the last crop of international biennales a string of duds?

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10 Bruce Nauman, Raw Materials (Tate Modern, London) The anti-Weather Project.

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Alison M. Gingeras is an independent curator and writer based in Paris and New York. She is currently working with a team of curators on a solo show by Daniel Buren opening at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in March 2005.

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David Rimanelli

1 Howard Hodgkin (Gagosian Gallery, New York) We're so far removed from the temper of Abstract Expressionism that the possibility of making gestural abstractions that are convincing seems unlikely, and writing about them, impossible. In any case, Hodgkin's pictures don't feel terribly AbEx. He says the content of Double Portrait, 2000-2003, is "the end of a friendship." I don't have any idea what this means, but I can't forget the angry upset orange seeping out of the interior panel onto the surrounding, ornately carved frame.

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2 "A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and "Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s-70s" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) Two brilliant LA exhibitions, demonstrating by contrast that New York's modern/contemporary art museums continue, overall, to churn out uninspired, even lousy shows (but maybe the future augurs well, given the goodly number of new appointments at the Whitney and MOMA). Curated by Ann Goldstein, "A Minimal Future?" received some harsh critiques, occasionally pointed but often petty. I thought it was a terrific survey, one that actually benefited from the sheer oddity of some its inclusions--for example, Lawrence Weiner's not-so-great paintings, which looked like parodies of Minimalist practice. Lynn Zelevansky's show read like the obverse of Goldstein's: Foregoing concision, "Beyond Geometry" spanned liberally over three decades and twenty-odd countries. Great grids: Max Bill's One Black to Eight Whites, 1956; Francois Morellet's 0[degrees]90[degrees]; Switching with Four Interfering Rhythms, 1965; Lygia Pape's Box of Cockroaches, 1967.

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3 Karlheinz Weinberger (Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York) Weinberger's best pictures date from the early to mid-'60s: images of teenage motorcycle hooliganism with an Alpine twist. The girls favor beyond-blown-out bouffants and Tyrolean patterns; the boys like oversize Elvis or swastika belt buckles. Very inventive, the way these guys truss up the crotches of their jeans. And this in Zurich?

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4 Alex Bag (Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York) She belongs on the Top Ten every year, whatever she does.

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5 Martin Honert (Matthew Marks Gallery, New York) There's something indescribable about this show, but I kept thinking, "It's real art, not the usual substitute." I laughed a lot, especially as I admired Santa Claus, 2002, Knight's Battle, 2003, and Ghosts, 2002, exclaiming repeatedly, "Look, it's Germany!" Honert based these sculptures closely on drawings he had done as a child, but Santa's helper Ruprecht appears in both the childhood "original" and the grown-up sculpture rather like a demonic apparition above St. Nick's shoulder, brandishing a pitchfork. Perhaps this accounts for my initial misapprehension of the figure as a Ku Klux Klansman in weird, gilt disco robes; his goodie bag looks creepy, too.

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6 Cold Mountain and Dogville In Anthony Minghella's film adaptation of the Brice Marden paintings--oh, wait, it's a Civil War melodrama, sorry--Nicole Kidman radiates beauty, sublimity, tragedy; Baz Luhrmann should direct her in Phedre. In Dogville, Lars von Trier drags her through the dirt for just shy of three hours, but she gets even in the end. How Europe sees America.

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7 Rachel Mason, Kissing President Bush (Yale School of Art 2004 MFA Sculpture Exhibition, New Haven, CT/Parlour Projects, Brooklyn) I asked Mason about her larger--than-life plaster sculpture depicting herself and our president sucking face: "What is it about George W that makes you feel hot?" Mason: "He is a wildly passionate man who consumes my will. My love for him is deep and frightening. The more he hurts me the more I love him. But he's also just so silly and fun-loving and yet he's even God-fearing in the old-fashioned sense. I love how his hair is always slightly tousled and his adorably awkward chuckle when he stammers for words. His wild and uncontrollable emotions are so exciting, but it even scares me a little, and you have to admit, he's just so mysterious!"

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8 "Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870-1940" (Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art, New York) Independent curator Pamela Kort organized an exhibition stunningly replete with deranged, hideous, hilarious, cruel art: Hail Germania! So many treasures, but three examples should suffice in this context: Max Klinger's divine Pissing Death, ca. 1880; Hannah Hoch's photomontage butchery Newlywed Peasants, 1931; and John Heartfield's Oh' Christmas Tree in Germany, How Crooked Are Your Branches!, 1934 (a desiccated Tannenbaum contorts itself into a swastika). Make invidious comparisons between this show's aesthetic dementia praecox and the slack tedium of SITE Santa Fe's "Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque" (the latter's curator, Robert Storr, contributes an essay to the catalogue--can't wait for Venice!). Up though February 14, and a must-see.

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9 Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Steidl) Don't let W magazine deceive you: The new Russia's not all Cy Twombly at the Hermitage. Russian prison guard Danzig Baldaev's compendium of underworld body art was the best book of the year. Sick, I'm telling you, really fucked up. Worth noting in connection with the burgeoning fashion for Boris Mikhailov's photographs of post-Glasnost misery: I saw an exhibition of his work at the ICA Boston, and I swear some of his desperately forlorn models sported tattoos straight from Baldaev's encyclopedia (or very close variations).

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10 The New York Times obituary of Jacques Derrida "Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74": So begins Jonathan Kandell's revoltingly stupid hatchet job on the late philosopher. It's genuinely shocking how debased the cultural standards at the Times have become. You don't have to be a "Derridean" to feel contemptuous of such merde. Speaking of which, who is Jonathan Kandell anyway? Too bad Piero Manzoni's not around: He could can Kandell.

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Artforum contributing editor David Rimanelli teaches art history at New York University. He has organized a number of exhibitions, including, most recently, "Women Beware Women," at Deitch Projects, New York, in 2003. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

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Matthew Higgs

1 Roger Ballen (Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA) Prior to seeing this eye-opening survey (organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego), I'd given almost no thought to Ballen's creepy, surreal-ish photographs. Since seeing it I've thought of little else. There's a lot to be wary of (and possibly even dislike) in Ballen's work: e.g., the apparent "manipulation" of his seemingly disenfranchised South African subjects (collaborators?) or the way he makes poverty appear somehow theatrical, poetic even. Yet Ballen is such a profoundly strange artist that I'm willing to forgive him (almost) anything.

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2 "Andy Warhol's Time Capsules" (Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh) Surveying the contents of a mere eighteen of Warhol's some six hundred "time capsules" was, frankly, overwhelming. Among the hundreds of gems Warhol squirreled away in these boxes (on view through January 2) were Clark Gable's shoes, the drafts of Warhol's 1964 "resignation" letter to his then-dealer Eleanor Ward, and the detritus of his mother's sad, byzantine Catholic existence. Simultaneously a portrait of the artist and of the times he lived through--and created--Warhol's time capsules may well be the greatest nonart-works of the twentieth century.

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3 Bruce Nauman, Raw Materials (Tate Modern, London) Raw Materials saw Nauman plundering his own extensive back catalogue of text(ual) works to create an anxious "greatest hits" sound installation throughout Tate Modern's forbidding Turbine Hall (where it remains on view until March 28). From Work Work through 100 Live and Die to No No No No--New Museum/Walter and Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room, Nauman's orderly cacophony came across as a paranoid riposte to the trippy spectacle of Olafur Eliasson's previous Turbine Hall crowd-pleaser, The Weather Project, 2003.

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4 "Power, Corruption and Lies" (Roth Horowitz, New York) Preempting the summer's rash of overliteral-minded anti-Bush exhibitions, Adam McEwen and Neville Wakefield's modest--and slyly political--group show was a curatorial gem. Thirty-six artists, including Lutz Bacher, Wallace Berman, Jeremy Deller, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Scott King, Nate Lowman, Aleksandra Mir, and Cady Noland, wrestled with what the curators charmingly described as "the smell of putrefaction that tends to curl around the shoulders of power."

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5 "Lee Lozano, Drawn from Life: 1961-1971" (P.S. I Contemporary Art Center, New York) P.S. I was, hands down, my space of the year: Everything I saw there looked great. None more so than director Alanna Heiss and curatorial advisor Bob Nickas's revealing survey of the eclectic (and eccentric) work of Lee Lozano (1930-1999). The epithet "maverick" was custom-made for Lozano, whose sometimes bad-tempered and often caustically funny art left this viewer wishing he'd had the opportunity to meet her.

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6 "Indigestible Correctness I & II" (Participant Inc. and Kenny Schachter/ROVE, New York) Lutz Bacher, Brian Degraw, Jimmy DeSana, Isa Genzken, Richard Kern, Kemba Pfahler, Francis Picabia, Richard Prince, and Christopher Wool headed up the very savvy cast of Rita Ackermann and Lizzi Bougatsos's angular and angsty two-part group show that made me wonder, "Why can't museums organize shows like this?"

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7 "Thrown: Influences and Intentions of West Coast Ceramics" (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver) The influence of the visionary British studio potter Bernard Leach on a generation of West Coast Canadian potters in the '60s and '70s might not sound like a recipe for one of the most compelling exhibitions of the year; but in the hands of curators Lee Plested, Scott Watson, and Charmian Johnson this exquisite (and beautifully installed) material positively sang. Watson's inspired programming at the Belkin has always taken unexpected (and unprecedented) turns, and "Thrown" gently amplified his idiosyncratic vision.

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8 "The Thought That Counts" (Sister, Los Angeles) LA-based sculptor Jason Meadows blurred the lines between curation and collaboration in this wonderfully odd project in which he created pedestals, plinths, bases, props, or supports for existing and newly commissioned sculptures by friends and peers like Liz Larner, Evan Holloway, Sean Landers, and Liz Craft. Seen together, the resultant "hybrids" (for want of a better term) displayed a joyous harmony born of confused and multiple authorship.

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9 "Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) LACMA curator Lynn Zelevansky's "Beyond Geometry" was an often subjective (global) romp through all things process, serially, and geometrically inclined: a (very) capacious church that found room for, among many others, Josef Albers, Blinky Palermo, Mel Bochner, and Karen Carson's (unknown-to-me) kinky cotton-duck-and-zipper "painting." Claustrophobically installed--in a good way--and full of illuminating diversions (Franz Eberhard Walther finally getting some kind of dues), "Beyond Geometry" was, despite its boring title, Tinseltown's summer sleeper.

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10 Mark Leckey, "Septic Tank" (Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York) Leckey's one-room apartment in London's West End--the cramped laboratory from which he works his increasingly weird cultural alchemy--has taken center stage in much of his recent production. "Septic Tank" free-associated among a peculiar cast of characters, including the late Patrick Procktor, Jacob Epstein, Graham Greene, actor Phil Daniels, Little Richard (a "religious icon," according to Leckey), and Jeff Koons. Simultaneously melancholic and celebratory, Leckey's recent brand of bed-sit conceptualism perfectly mirrors our increasingly unsettled times.

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Matthew Higgs is the director and chief curator at White Columns, New York, and a regular contributor to Artforum.

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Lynne Cooke

1 Francis Alys (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg/Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin) In a pair of slyly understated solo shows of works old and new, Alys parses preoccupations as poetic as they are political. In these disarmingly simple installations that depend on a self-reflexive, quasicuratorial mode now completely integral to his practice, he draws deeply on his immediate milieu for his ostensible subjects. Yet he never gets mired in the merely local, nor does he succumb to the fecklessness of the self-styled nomadic artist.

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2 Pierre Huyghe's Harvard Project (Sert Gallery, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA) The French artist's wryly haunting puppet play is set in a miniature theater, an ultracon-temporary "blob" extruded from the bowels of Le Corbusier's still-underregarded Carpenter Center. In a series of abbreviated scenes, Huyghe's marionette show reprises the predicament of an artist/architect "genius" alternately commissioned and repulsed by the institutional patron, to poignantly memorable effect. Like others of Huyghe's ambitious yet transient "events," it will be edited into a film and presented in situ.

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3 Mike Kelley, "The Uncanny" (Tate Liverpool) This caustic reworking of a project Kelley had realized in the Netherlands a decade earlier eviscerated the prurience at the heart of British culture by amassing a vast array of works from sources as apparently diverse as the routinely vilified Nicholas Treadwell stable, the ever-visible YBAs, and collections of nineteenth-century medical models. By juxtaposing this disturbingly homogeneous ensemble with the "Harems," his personal collections of trash, trivia, and treasures, Kelley adroitly refused an omniscient position in favor of sparring mano a mano.

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4 Rem Koolhaas, Seattle Public Library More style than substance, Content (Taschen), the Dutch architect's restless compendium of theoretical and journalistic sound bites, was an enervated recapitulation of OMA's trajectory to date, lacking the galvanizing energy and crystalline vision that fueled his earlier publications. In marked contrast, the remarkable Seattle library, following close on the heels of the student center for Chicago's IIT campus, finally allowed Koolhaas to realize his ambitions at an appropriate scale and in the public domain. And his brilliant Casa da Musica in Porto now nears completion as well. Once again, Koolhaas moves far ahead of the field. But whatever happened to his many museum projects?

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5 Bruce Nauman, Raw Materials (Tate Modern, London) "You may not want to be here"--the provisional quantifier in one of Nauman's spoken texts--acknowledges that the experience will prove far from seductive or exalting. Yet rather than threatening (despite Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room), Nauman here sardonically withholds (Thank You Thank You) in a brilliant intervention that undermines most of the previous, highly theatrical forays in the Tate's cavernous Turbine Hall by turning up the volume. And he throws the onus back on the viewer: Work Work.

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6 Anri Sala (Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC) The Albanian-born artist's first large(r)-scale museum show, in ARC's temporary ecclesiastical quarters, was characteristically low-key and elliptical, resistant to heavy theorizing yet undeniably charged. Sala's tersely abbreviated narratives make exegesis seem clumsy, almost beside the point. Given his ability to choose the visually telling moment/incident/idea that, like an onion, can be peeled apart without revealing a kernel or core, an ensemble of his works resists the dulling, deadening effect that typifies shows devoted exclusively to projected work.

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7 Catherine Sullivan, Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land (Angel Orensanz Foundation, New York, Apr. 10) In yoking performance to video installation, Sullivan's practice betrays the studied artifice, breadth of reference, and complex visual/verbal layering that are hallmarks of James Coleman's art, for example. The manic, anarchic, and absurd, however, relentlessly destabilize her world, reflecting a vision ever prey to disruption, chaos, and anomie. Tightly choreographed, kaleidoscopically structured, this cryptic performance remains indelible.

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8 "Diana Thater: Keep the Faith!" (Museum fur Gegenwartskunst Siegen/Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany) Spread across two museums, of very different types and scale in different regions of Germany, Thater's retrospective beautifully and deftly responded to the particulars of site and sequencing in a subtle redevising of key works for their new environs. Her rousing, admonishing title attests to the consistency of purpose, the clarity of vision, and the rigor of a pursuit that leaves her somewhere far out on her own.

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9 Mark Wallinger, Sleeper (Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin) Dressed in a well-worn bear suit, the British artist undertook a week of nocturnal ramblings through the luminous empty expanses of Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie, still the most glorious space in this city of untrammeled new construction. Given the site's proximity to the historic Zoo and the Tiergarten (which formerly abutted the Wall), Wallinger's absurd peregrinations in the guise of Berlin's heraldic emblem spoke to the singularly complex intersection of nature, culture, and politics in the German capital over much of the last century.

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10 Vivienne Westwood (Victoria & Albert Museum, London) Irrepressible, erratic, Westwood's protean inventiveness has been purloined and refined by more polished and certified fashion designers for decades. The V & A's spirited retrospective, together with the recent revised edition of Jane Mulvagh's fascinating if unsparing 1998 biography, Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life (Harper-Collins), demonstrates, albeit somewhat belatedly, that Westwood deserves to be far more than a maverick local legend.

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Lynne Cooke has been the curator at Dia Art Foundation since 1991. She also writes and teaches on contemporary art. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

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Daniel Birnbaum

1 "Louise Lawler and Others" (Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel) Says Lawler in the catalogue accompanying this splen-did exhibition organized by Philipp Kaiser, "Art is always a collaboration with what came before you and what comes after you." Somewhere in between the before and the after, something seems to emerge that we want to call the present. Theorists have questioned whether there is such a thing, and Lawler's art could easily be read as a confirmation of a philosophy of difference claiming delay and displacement as more original than immediacy. And yet the clashes in Lawler's work--sometimes subtle, sometimes violent (and often funny)--no doubt create radiant sparks of an ever-new Now.

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2 "Sturtevant: The Brutal Truth" (Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt) Clement Greenberg once expressed his doubts that humor could ever play a major role in art. Too bad he couldn't have lived to witness the confusion produced by two go-go dancers (one black, the other white) performing in Frankfurt's modern art museum during the opening of "The Brutal Truth"--one dancing according to Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "original" instructions, the other to those of Sturtevant (which couldn't have been too different). As John Waters says in the catalogue, "Cutting out all the stuff that doesn't matter. Down to the bone. [T]hat is what I admire about Sturtevant's work: no messing around. Very brutal." MMK director Udo Kittelmann and curator Mario Kramer devoted all of their galleries to this brutality, thus staging Sturtevant's largest exhibition to date and the year's most daring curatorial experiment.

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3 Michael S. Riedel Repetition, replication, displacement. This German artist is giving rise to a quasi world of distorted mirror-images and new takes on things that we already know, or so we thought. The white flower he placed on Sturtevant's table at the opening of "The Brutal Truth" seemed to me an original. Otherwise, everything has been doubled. Riedel offers us a twin universe: The artist himself exists in different versions.

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4 About Cafe (Bangkok) This cafe/gallery/library has managed to attract many of today's most interesting artists, not just locally but from around the world. I spent a number of great July afternoons in the cool and pleasant reading room. Downstairs they were installing a piece by Daniel Buren.

5 Ayse Erkmen (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt) Erkmen moves things around, provides a new context for things. Over the years she's recontextualized statues, ships, and animals. This time it was something rather formless: a muddy landscape of puddles, dirty water, and irregularly distributed islands. You could jump from one to another, but your boots would get soaked through anyway and you might even have got stuck. This is an everyday experience in many places in the world, but not at the heart of Europe's financial capital. Thank you!

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6 Pan Sonic The electronic duo's new box set, Kesto (234:4:4), is their magnum opus and sure to go down as a milestone in the history of electronic music. It goes without saying that nearly 235 minutes of sound means lots of listening. The tracks I've heard so far are frightening and sublime.

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7 Philippe Parreno Having at this point published essays on most of the key artists of his generation--Pierre Huyghe, Olafur Eliasson, Jorge Pardo, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Doug Aitken, Liam Gillick, even Bjork--Philippe Parreno can no longer be thought of as the covert center of today's discourse on art. I've always felt that in his own art we get a glimpse of the future, not only because of such science fiction--like titles as The Boy from Mars, 2003, but because he shows things I've never seen before. In a recent essay on Anri Sala, Parreno writes of a film that doesn't exist but that somehow emerges in the creative critic's mind: "This is a film that Anri will never make but that he projected in my head. I dated it 2010." Then follows the most horrifying story. Parreno has seen the future.

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8 Towers Not since Vladimir Tatlin's times have artists been so keen on building towers. Anselm Kiefer is back with a vengeance as the builder of monumental, otherworldly palaces in Milan; Rirkrit Tiravanija has constructed a strictly antimonumental wooden tower in the bombastic "Hall of Honor" in Munich's Haus der Kunst. Younger artists like Michael Beutler and Tomas Saraceno are building vertically all over the globe: in Germany, Italy, Argentina, and Russia. In Saraceno's case, the architecture is heavenly in a literal sense. With lighter-than-air technology, he will soon make structures that fly (he says).

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9 "Phonorama" (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe) The day I read about the death of Jacques Derrida, the first thinker to discuss the full implications of phonocentrism in Western metaphysics, I happened to see this massive, fascinating exhibition (organized by cultural historian Brigitte Felderer) subtitled "A Cultural History of the Voice as a Medium." Works by Valie Export and Joseph Beuys, for example, are juxtaposed with bizarre machines--scientific and occult instruments by figures like Friedrich Jurgenson, who communicated with the dead via radio, and Wolfgang von Kempelen, who in 1790 constructed an impressive machine to simulate human speech. Death really does have a voice.

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10 Second Deaths Beginning with his 1981 essay "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," Derrida, whose philosophy always forwarded a critique of a certain Metaphysics of Life, brought the genre of the obituary to new speculative heights. His remarkable essays occasioned by the deaths of Deleuze, Foucault, Althusser, Levinas, Gadamer, and many others, evolved a novel kind of writing about finitude, a kind of thanatography, which somehow seemed to anticipate his own demise. Now that Derrida's death has happened, it seems a repetition, just as with Janet Leigh, who had already died so violently that it left a mark on several generations of artists. Reading her recent obituary in the International Herald Tribune, I can only think of Derrida and Douglas Gordon. A strange thing, this second death.

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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.

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Jack Bankowsky

1 Anthony Burdin "Recording artist" Burdin is no stranger to the multicity tour, but the twist is, he never gets out of his car. Forget about three nights at the Beacon Theater: Burdin pops in a favorite CD, sings over the tracks (or over himself, singing over the tracks), and records the results--all the while filming his roadie's progress out the window with a handheld camera. I duly kicked myself for missing his unscheduled late-night performance at the Frieze Art Fair, but an audience with the artist in Michele Maccarone's darkened and dead-bolted booth (nothing like a closed door to whet first-in-mymuseum-group appetites!) revealed the live act to be but half the show. What I discovered was a multifaceted play on recording-art conventions (drawings, tapes, annotated album covers) and a trove of "music videos" as real-rock potent as they are MTV impervious. "Mostly," Burdin explains, "I concentrate on my driving."

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2 Pierre Huyghe, "Streamside Day Follies" (Dia: Chelsea, New York) Streamside Day, 2003, Huyghe's film-within-an-installation, was winding down its Dia run when the ball dropped on 2003, but its performative daredevilism cast a long shadow across the year ahead. Orchestrated (and filmed) by the artist to mark the opening of Streamside Knolls, a planned suburban tract carved from the forest in Fishkill, New York, the awkward festivities could have come off as merely patronizing, an easy send-up of middle-class values. Instead, Huyghe manages a tricky poise: The proceedings are neither parodic nor protective. What gets "performed" under the pressure of Huyghe's low-key intervention are the primitive sputterings of human communication--and community. In Huyghe's framing, this newly minted "utopia" is less drearily familiar than strange and estranging.

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3 Los Super Elegantes (Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York) I've been trumpeting this conceptual duo-cum-cabaret act all year, but this is a "best of," so I come out again for these globe-trotting emissaries of trash in translation and their refreshing brand of cross-cultural misprision that made Tunga's House Bar the theatrical sleeper of 2004. In Latin America, Tunga is something of a scared cow, so to make the venerated vanguardist the subject of a full-length, if low-budget, drama is as kinky as it sounds. The bohemian paterfamilias apparently runs a louche salon in a Rio suburb where international truffle hogs can be found nose to the coffee table 24/7. Here the demiurge implodes at his own birthday party as his pious mother does the dishes, all the while wistfully bemoaning her lapsed calling as a theorist of Tropicalia. Talk about a surprise vantage on the touchy elisions of imperialist modernism!

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4 Photorealism Revised Can it merely be a perfume of the outre that lends Photorealism such allure these days? I'm not being coy; I don't fully understand the pull. For this reason, I thank Xavier Veihan for erecting a pavilion (a work of art in its own right) dedicated to pondering this revisionist mystery at New York's National Academy Museum. Preternaturally aglow against an all-black interior, canvases by Robert Bechtle, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, et al. look as proud on their perch between painting and photography as Franz Gertsch's monumental images of Patti Smith did early this year at Gagosian.

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5 and 6 Jennifer Bolande and Rachel Harrison (Alexander and Bonin, New York/Greene Naftali, New York) When Harrison's tiny photos of a tubby Liz Taylor embedded in a cement bunker showed up at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, I thought Eureka!--but I also thought Jennifer Bolande. Like Harrison, Bolande is not a photographer per se, but photography plays a big part in her "sculpture." A master gambit of the 1980s, the photo as object has long been central to Bolande's art, and yet her multifaceted miniaturism was somewhat sidelined by that decade's more single-minded examinations of art in the age of photography. Sometimes it takes a new talent to teach us how to appreciate an older one, to rescue a difficult voice from the simplifications of period identity. I would not risk reducing either artist by this anxious equation, were it not for a pair of stellar shows this year that let them speak eloquently for themselves.

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7 Ed Ruscha (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) When your art is all about economy, greatness accrues a little at a time--which is to say, each time you hit your target. The virtue of Ruscha's twin surveys of drawings and photographs (organized by Margit Rowell and Sylvia Wolf, respectively) is that they showed this artist hitting his mark virtually every time, from those period-perfect epigrams to early experiments with the camera like Joe's Plymouth, a 1960 photo of a photo on a stick that looks as fresh today as, well, a Rachel Harrison or a Jennifer Bolande.

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8 and 9 Brian Calvin and Mathew Cerletty (Anton Kern Gallery, New York/Rivington Arms, New York) You know when you say, "It's good for what it is"? For me, Vincent Fecteau and Nancy Shaver are "good for for what they are" (both are runners-up here for modest but remarkable shows at Feature, Inc.). And what about Richard Tuttle? But now I'm getting confused ... aren't these artists just plain good? Calvin, often called the slacker Alex Katz (also good for what he is), makes paintings that are formally inventive, subtly observed, and gorgeously painted, too, in a low-key kind of way. In "Alter Ego," his second New York solo, Cerletty looked as strong as he did in his 2003 debut. This time we found him doting on a single model until the doctor/dandy's likeness virtually vibrates with craft--and libido. In one painting the willowy physician's lips are impastoed pink in a jarring departure from the rest of the facture. It's as if the artist just wanted to see what would happen to his muse (and his painting) if he dared it. The art of Calvin and Cerletty is "good for what it is," and I bet it's a good deal better than that.

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10 Charles Ray (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin) A new work by Charles Ray is inevitably an event. If the unveiling of his life-size, cast aluminum Tractor, 2004, was overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the opening of the Flick Collection, a lengthy tour of the sculpture ensures viewers a chance to savor its calibrated contradictions. Aren't you sick of artists glorifying farm machinery? Exactly. Leave it to Ray to start way strange--and make it stranger.

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Jack Bankowsky is editor at large of Artforum and was guest editor of the magazine's October special issue "This is Today: Pop After Pop."

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Bruce Hainley

1 "Sturtevant: The Brutal Truth" (Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt) Removing even the permanent collection, intrepid MMK director Udo Kittelmann and in-house curator Mario Kramer turned over the entire museum to Elaine Sturtevant, giving gorgeous space to more than 140 dazzling works, many seen for the first time in this exhibition, on view through January 30. Part of the instant fun is that at first glance it looks like a weird but really great group show; of course it's not that at all. Complicated, maddening, exhilarating, the brutal truth repeated throughout is her project's undeniable greatness. Thought as power is beauty.

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2 Tomma Abts and Vincent Fecteau (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven) Such a brilliant combo. Curator Phillip van den Bossche had the perspicacity to trust the artists, impeccably providing each a solo room and each a room where one curated things--often rescued from deep storage (Har Sanders, Erik Pape)--to illuminate the other. Their choices brought out hitherto unseeable mutual connections--in fact, the two artists ended up collaborating on their curated rooms--and showed just how dopey much curating's slavishness to "proper" art history is.

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3 Entourage (HBO) I mean, it's Sex and the City for guys. Bawdy, jacked with Hollywood verismo courtesy of coproducer Mark Wahlberg et al., the program lets Debi Mazar strut her brash stuff and Jeremy Piven smarm his way to TV greatness, while Adrian Grenier and crew cruise the Sunset Strip for our pleasure. Mazar and Piven, respectively cast as a kick-ass PR rep and shark agent to Grenier's up-and-coming, straight-from-Queens-with-his-boys movie star, prove the high-school drama-arts chestnut true: There really are no small roles.

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4 Lee Lozano (P.S. I Contemporary Art Center, New York) Nasty, lewd, and brilliant, Lozano threw up so much of what the art world force-fed. Curators Bob Nickas and Alanna Heiss, P.S. I's director, gave the woman time (which is space) so that the ferocity of her work could be paid heed. As with Sturtevant, the history books get rewritten from here.

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5 Trisha Donnelly (Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Casey Kaplan, New York) Understanding the burden of the performer and wanting to escape becoming the dog-and-pony show the art world adores, Donnelly, unannounced to and undocumented for anyone, slipped into caterer's penguin uniform and served the fancy-pants guests at the Carnegie International's gala opening dinner. Could there be a more clarifying (if unconscious) homage to Mierle Laderman Ukeles's washing the steps of the museum? Donnelly's second solo show, at Casey Kaplan, continued her burrowing pursuits.

6 The Return of Scary, Glamorous Fags: "OMNI: A Celebration of Klaus Nomi's 60th Birthday" (New Langton Arts, San Francisco) and A Night with Paul Lynde (Ultra Suede, Los Angeles) Having already produced a killer Klaus Nomi'zine (Apocalypse Then) and postered their city with the hypnotic diva in full-on tuxedo-from-Mars regalia, Berlin-based collective PP (artists D-L Alvarez and Gwenael Rattke) staged Alvarez and Kevin Killian's play Total Eclipse, showed rare concert films and memorabilia, and then discoed the night away. PP's intervention--stealth political action--recalls a time when fags were weird, fanged, and, well, not for kids. Slier, Paul Lynde often seemed to be for kids, the ur-PeeWee Herman. Having purchased, for a depressingly low sum, a box of Lynde paraphernalia on eBay, A Night with Paul Lynde star Michael Airington completed the one-man cabaret act Lynde never got around to. Boozy, cruisey, and vicious, Lynde let his zingers fly, channeling a snarling flamboyance into America's living room. Wanting somehow, somewhere, to acknowledge the recent passing of a great cook, I'll let Lynde have the last words: When Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall asked, "According to the French chef Julia Child, how much is a pinch?" the Center Square wagged, "Just enough to turn her on."

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7 Frank Stella (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) Curator of painting and sculpture Janet Bishop, together with curatorial associate Jill Dawsey, took eight great Stellas--Shoubeegi, 1978, wows in enamel and glitter(!)--cleanly hung them, and provided a brief, cogent essay (by Dawsey). There's no way a gonzo retrospective in some enough-already Gehry building could have been better. Oh, and, Art Fans, Stella's career alone complicates any neat history of the '60s (see also picks number one and number four).

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8 Douglas Crase, Both: A Portrait in Two Parts (Pantheon) and George W.S. Trow, The Harvard Black Rock Forest (University of Iowa Press) In a year when an environmentalist won the Nobel Peace Prize, two illuminating meditations on America and the land through differing moral negotiations of the personal. Crase's dual biography of botanists extraordinaire, Rupert Barnaby and Dwight Ripley (their passion--and expertise--was legumes), provides proof of both men's artistic gifts, their behind-the-scenes bankrolling of much of the 1950s New York art scene, and the loving complexity of their fifty-year relationship. Trow's 1984 New Yorker essay, in book form for the first time, traces the history of specific forests, American silviculture, and man's increasingly attenuated relation to that land.

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9 Giorgio Morandi (Lucas Schoormans Gallery, New York) Intense. A disarming negotiation of the abstractions of the real, ostensibly in the form of still lifes of boxes, cups, and vases. No wonder Robert Irwin called the Italian master the only great European Abstract Expressionist. Six ravishing oil paintings, a drawing, and a truly mind-boggling watercolor--endlessly generous, endlessly mysterious.

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10 Patrick Hill (David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles) The dude might have begun using Venice boardwalk affect (wood scraps, tie-dyed denim, glass, ribbon)--not to vouchsafe his sincerity (how most "craft" is deployed today) but unpacking it to limn where such affect came from (Allan Kaprow, feminist art, Mike Kelley)--but he finds a way to shoot the tube of such materials to ride to gleaming elegance and, um, soul. The sculptures depend on glass's reflection showing what isn't there as there.

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Los Angeles-based Artforum contributing editor Bruce Hainley teaches in the masters of art criticism and theory program at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Art--A Sex Book, his collaboration with John Waters, was published by Thames & Hudson late last year.

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Thelma Golden

1 Dover Street Market (London) The recent frenzied spate of museum building has seen unfortunate comparisons made between these cultural institutions and shopping malls. But I love malls the way I love museums. Comme des Garcons founder Rei Kawakubo's Dover Street Market is rightly being described as the ultimate mall. Everything she thinks you should want is spread out over six floors. It is the most sublime, sensual shopping experience, carefully curated to include an Azzedine Alaia boutique, a dozen Comme lines, and Terry de Havilland shoes. Dover Street is not the perfect mall; it is actually the perfect museum.

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2 Rudolf Stingel, Plan B (Grand Central Terminal, New York) and Janet Cardiff, Her Long Black Hair (Central Park, New York) The best public art reconnects us to the city, jolting us out of our habitual relationship to place. This year, two projects revived my interest in sites that I have loved, but in sentimental, cliched ways. In July, Stingel's 27,000-square-foot carpet, Plan B, facilitated by the Art Production Fund, MTA Arts for Transit, and Creative Time, invigorated Grand Central in a way that the station's restoration never did. And Cardiff's audio-walk project for the Public Art Fund, Her Long Black Hair, allowed for a different route into the treasures of Central Park.

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3 The Double Album Outkast's marvelous CD Speakerboxx/The Love Below got me wondering about exhibition equivalents of the double album. Ann Goldstein's exceptional "A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968," at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Lynn Zelevansky's "Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s-70s," at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, revised the script about significant movements and practices for both the specialist field and the general public. Eugenie Tsai and Connie Butler's incomparable Robert Smithson retrospective (also at MOCA) continued LA's remarkable run of serious, superior exhibitions.

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4 "Fade (1990-2003)" (Luckman Gallery/University Fine Arts Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles) My favorite scene in The Shawshank Redemption sees Tim Robbins escaping from prison by swimming through a sewer pipe, emerging from the sludge into freedom. There have been a number of exhibitions this year that similarly cut through the muck of identity politics. Most notable was Malik Gaines's "Fade," the first installment of a yearlong, three-part project designed to excavate the recent history of African-American artists in Los Angeles. Here, Gaines brilliantly navigates the inside/outside, mainstream/margin politics that still haunt discussions of cultural specificity.

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5 Vanessa Beecroft, VB54 ("Terminal 5," John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York) Ten years ago I organized an exhibition about images of black masculinity. Until recently, I never considered a companion show about black women; the idea seemed futile, because I spend so much time being enraged/intrigued by the use of black women's bodies in popular culture (the credit-card swipe through a woman's ass in Nelly's video Tip Drill is the current target of my fury). Hearing about Beecroft's performance in the short-lived "Terminal 5" exhibition--and then seeing "unauthorized" images of the work's near-naked African-American women covered with black makeup and wearing silver ankle chains--made me realize this is a subject I cannot continue to ignore.

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6 David Hammons, 2004 Dak'Art Sheep Raffle (Dakar, Senegal) Oprah Winfrey began the nineteenth season of her extraordinary show by giving new cars to an entire studio audience. The host, as is her way, discussed the possibility of winning the car in terms of personal transformation. The result was classic Oprah: a crescendo of screams and tears, at once totally real and completely fake. What Oprah attempted with her scripted extravaganza was actually achieved in the simple, brilliant highlight of Dak'Art, the Biennial of Contemporary African Art. As his "official" contribution to the biennial, Hammons organized a weeklong sheep raffle, giving away two real sheep at a different Dakar intersection each day to winners who (without a teleprompter) burst into exaltation at their unexpected but much-needed good fortune.

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7 On Kawara, "Paintings of 40 Years" (David Zwirner, New York) After a summer of deadening political conventions, accelerating campaign coverage, and the ongoing documentation of the war, I began to feel the ill effects of living in a media-saturated world. Overwhelmed and depressed, I went into the Kawara show. A beautifully installed retrospective, it provided an amazing opportunity to view the influential work of this mysterious artist. Among these paintings, I felt time both compress and stretch out.

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8 Senga Nengudi A conceptual sculptor who emerged in the 1970s, Nengudi has recently had a welcome and necessary revival, capped this year by her inclusion in the Carnegie International. Nengudi was a critical part of the generation of the black avant-garde in New York who exhibited at Linda Goode Bryant's seminal space, Just Above Midtown. But when many of her early works were damaged or destroyed, she abruptly departed. Working ever since in Colorado, Nengudi has taken up the re-creation of her early pieces as a critical part of her project. I am thrilled she is back in the conversation that her work helped create.

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9 "Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century" (Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art) This ingenious investigation of eighteenth-century dress and its link with the day's furniture and decorative arts showed the erotic possibilities of period costume and the seductive potential of contemporaneous rooms. Most amazing was the use of mannequins in outrageous mise-en-scenes. Organized by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton with their colleagues from the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, it was a paragon of museum presentation.

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10 Tom Ford The designer's beautifully timed, masterfully choreographed and graceful exit. There's a curatorial career metaphor in there somewhere.

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Thelma Golden is deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she is currently working on an exhibition of Chris Ofili's watercolors. She also recently organized a retrospective of the fashion designer Patrick Kelly for the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

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Paul Schimmel 

1 El Greco (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) At a time when we expect so much from artists at such a young age, David Davies's El Greco exhibition told us a great deal about what we lack--the sustained nurturing of an artist throughout his entire career. After a long and awkward developmental period, El Greco finally came into his own in his late forties. Today we appreciate him not for his god-given talent or his facility with paint but because, like Cezanne, he created an electrifying and magical language that is arguably more relevant now than it was in his own day.

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2 "Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years" (C & M Arts, New York) Go figure. It took a large-scale, secondary-market exhibition for Koons to get the flat-out recognition of the New York Times, which he has deserved since the early '80s. Rigorously selected and wide-ranging in scope, this quarter-century survey proved to the final doubters that Koons is among the virtuosos of our times.

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3 "Chris Burden: Bridges and Bullets" (Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills) The largest exhibition ever of new work by one of LA's most influential artists was for me dominated by the abstract, thirty-two-foot-long Curved Bridge, 2003, made of over ten thousand parts. Unlike the other works in the exhibition, this one was not based on a real bridge but instead provided a metaphorical bridge between Burden's performances, installations, and sculptures of the late '60s and early '70s and his recent interest in models, engineering, and architecture. Just high enough to walk under, Curved Bridge's simple, minimalist structure spanned the entirety of the gallery, and its graceful curve resembled a human figure with its back arched.

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4 "Paul McCarthy: Brain Box Dream Box" (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven) This exhibition provided much-needed insight into the most consistent and overlooked aspect of McCarthy's oeuvre: drawing. Beginning with extraordinarily prophetic works of the late '60s and continuing to this day, drawing, notes, scribbles, studies, and large-scale presentation drawings have been an essential part of McCarthy's work. This exhibition treated us to a selection that--when placed in the context of major installations including Tokyo Santa, Santa's Trees, 1996/1999, and Piccadilly Circus, 2003--resembled diary entries.

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5 Takashi Murakami, "Inochi" (Blum & Poe, Los Angeles) Just when the art world thought Murakami had thrown it all away for commercial irrelevance, he returned with the most delicate, poetic, and deeply moving work of his entire career. Inochi, 2004, is an installation comprising a life-size sculpture of an alien boy--part science fiction, part self-portrait--as well as photographs and a video of the figure in various situations such as a school classroom. Intensely personal and uncomfortably revealing, Inochi, meaning "life," shows us the breathtaking range and ambition of an artist who is doing his best work yet.

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6 Lee Bontecou (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) When Elizabeth Smith kicked open the door for Bontecou scholars with her Focus Series exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1993, the impact was immediate and palpable. It seemed apparent--even to the reticent artist herself--that the time was ripe for a major reappraisal. Smith's recent Bontecou show, organized in association with Ann Philbin of the UCLA Hammer Museum, fulfilled that promise by bringing to light significant work from a thirty-year period during which the artist worked in relative isolation. Bontecou's indifference (at best) to the art world made for a revelatory retrospective that not only examined older iconic works but also more recent lyrical surprises.

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7 Dieter Roth (Museum of Modern Art and P.S. I Contemporary Art Center, New York) Not unlike the Bontecou exhibition, "Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective" offered breathtaking insight into an artist long known but little understood. Originally organized by Basel's Schaulager, the show provided a sprawling, nonhierarchical take on Roth's increasingly influential practice, which extends Rauschenberg's intermingling of art and life and life and art.

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8 "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawing" (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) For many, Janie C. Lee and Melvin P. Lader's retrospective of Gorky's drawings was too much of a good thing. But for those of us passionate about the artist's charged and evocative works on paper, the opportunity to see the largest appraisal of them to date was immensely satisfying. I can think of no other midcentury American artist (with the possible exception of de Kooning) for whom drawing was so central. The works' virtuosity, as well as their highly subjective nature, made this one of the year's most fascinating and challenging exhibitions in terms of sheer intensity.

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9 "Jennifer Pastor: The Perfect Ride" (Regen Projects, Los Angeles) A long time coming, "The Perfect Ride" was worth the wait. The show consisted of one work with three elements: the "ride," a projected line-drawing animation of a bull ride; the "ear," a sculpture of the inner ear emphasizing the ear's role in connecting the outer world and the inner workings of the brain; and, most magnificently, the "dam." Unfortunately the "dam" was exhibited for the first time in the Italian pavilion during the 2003 Venice Biennale without the film or the sculpture, and got lost. However, Regen Projects brought all three works together as intended, revealing the unique internal logic of Pastor's project.

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10 "Gordon Matta-Clark: Bingo" (David Zwirner, New York) This exhibition affirmed yet again that Matta-Clark merits another retrospective. (The last one was organized by the MCA Chicago over 20 years ago.) Along with Robert Smithson, Matta-Clark is arguably one of the most influential artists to cross the boundaries of sculpture, installation, and performance--all with a sense of social and political responsibility. Working at a time when many other activists believed they could and would change the world, his vision not only made us aware of the urban ecology, but in fact turned its blight into art.

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Paul Schimmel is chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where he is currently organizing the exhibitions "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines" and "Ecstasy: In and About Altered States."

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Tom Vanderbilt

1 "The Snow Show" (Kemi and Rovaniemi, Finland) I would have used any excuse to visit the Finnish Lapland town of Rovaniemi, where Alvar Aalto's stunning municipal buildings stand, but "The Snow Show," curated by Lance Fung there and in Kemi, provided architecture of an even more native variety--ice and snow structures by Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, and others, their medium harvested from local lakes and engineered by Finnish master ice-builder Seppo Makinen. Part Fitzgeraldian winter carnival, part Smithsonesque exercise in entropic dissipation, the whimsy and beauty of these glacial constructions was enough to melt your heart.

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2 "Building the Unthinkable" (Apex Art, New York) The "Doomsday Clock" of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sits at seven minutes to midnight--back to where it was at the dawn of the cold war. Curator Christian Stayner probed the clear and present dangers with a show that reached back with a strange kind of nuclear nostalgia to a time when we were symmetrically paired against the only enemy that mattered. The show was dominated physically and metaphorically by Dominic McGill's Model for a Deathwish Generation, 2002, a simmering diorama of Bikini Atoll set between the two hulking hemispheres of a hydrogen device, as abominable and Ozymandian as The Bomb itself.

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3 An-My Le, "29 Palms" (Murray Guy, New York) America's live-fire landscape, captured in sober, large-format elegance. US troops mobilize in a rocky expanse that could be Tora Bora but is actually two hours from LA. This is mock war, but interspersed with the occasional poignant punctum: One soldier puts an embracing arm on another during an exercise; a cross rises from the desert floor; armored cavalry regiments move through a panorama worthy of William Henry Jackson. The brevity of the battle for Iraq suggests the worth of this verisimilitude in military terms, though the ensuing calamity demonstrates the real-world limits to war games.

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4 Clifford Ross, Mountain I (Sonnabend Gallery, New York) Can a photograph ever satisfy our memory of sight? Unable to fully document the image of a Colorado mountain as he remembered it, Ross constructed a back-to-the-future hybrid device out of cannibalized Fairchild Instruments aerial cameras to take this ultra-high-res picture, in the process bringing an exhilarating, unprecedented level of clarity and depth to landscape photography.

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5 "Leonardo's Automobile" (Museo Leonardiano, Vinci, Italy) This exhibition presented the first compelling model of da Vinci's so-called "car," sketched in the Codex Atlanticus and long a mystery to scholars. Acting on a new theory by American robotics designer Mark Rosheim, an Italian team realized a working model of what is now thought to be a premodern robot designed for court amusement, centuries ahead of the automatons of Jacques de Vaucanson and Wolfgang von Kempelen.

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6 The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Monacelli Press) "I looked in through the glass, saw some blood and ran home and called the police," reports Sarah Abbott, doll-size resident of the miniaturized forensic-evidence world of criminal investigator Frances Glessner Lee. For years, these 1940s crime-scene tableaux (decidedly not doll-houses) have beguiled visitors to the Medical Examiner's Office in Baltimore. Now, photographer Corinne May Botz brings Lee's exactingly rendered interiors of scale-model death into an unsettling new light; suffused with color and shadow, and stripped of context that would reveal their true dimensions, these scenarios, crafted to help police investigators find "truth in a nutshell," take on an outsize pathos.

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7 Mike and Doug Starn, "Gravity of Light" (Fargfabriken, Kunsthalle, Stockholm) The Starn brothers place a sun at the center of their own artistic universe: A looming carbon-arc lamp, sizzling and snapping, some relic of Victorian science, searingly illuminates a room ringed with works exploring the meanings of light and darkness. There are photographs of moths that seem printed on moth wings, a representation of the blind Chinese monk Ganjin (whose temple is opened, to the light, once a year), and the dendritic outlines of leaves and trees that are turning black, to carbon, returning to the source of the light.

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8 "Terminal 5" (John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York) "Today my favorite kind of atmosphere is the airport atmosphere," Andy Warhol once declared. And yet, air travel is often a blind spot for artists; as marine painting was central to the art of seagoing seventeenth-century Holland, so one would expect contemporary art to be rife with images of air travel, the agent of today's globalization. "Terminal 5," Rachel K. Ward's doomed exhibit in the Eero Saarinen-designed terminal, had looked to arrest this deficiency (Ryoji Ikeda's sound-and-light spectacle was the most winning entry), giving viewers one last time to meander through this graying, unmediated monument to the future before it's occupied by new owner JetBlue. The supreme irony here is that the Port Authority, never completely loyal to the idea of saving the landmark, closed the show in order to protect the building.

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9 Rackstraw Downes (Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York) Downes's work here is brilliant realism for an all-seeing age that has forgotten how to look. Probing into silent, interstitial spaces and freeing our eyes from the tyranny of the decisive moment, Downes reinvigorates the tactile pleasures of sight. Consider his rugged Winslow Homer landscapes denuded by man, as in the paintings of a Rio Grande water-flow monitoring station, the dry riverbed engraved with ATV tracks, awaiting nature's eternal return.

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10 Jane and Louise Wilson, Erewhon (303 Gallery, New York) The Wilson twins again interrogate mute sites of power, this time a decaying sanatorium in New Zealand that serves as monument to that country's statist therapeutic culture in the period after World War I. The filmed spaces are charged with a haunting Kubrickian stillness, and an air of prescient unease pervades the room as one wanders among the screens, which seem more like flickering walls of repressed memory.

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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).

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Pamela M. Lee

1 "A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) With massive, awe-inspiring cubes by the likes of such stalwarts as Tony Smith and Donald Judd, Ann Goldstein's expansive exhibition of Minimalist sculpture and painting gave new meaning to the museum "blockbuster." Yet who knew how funny, lush, and downright weird much of this supposedly austere work really is, as in the extraterrestrial-meets-surfer aesthetics of John McCracken's gorgeous vermilion plinths?

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2 The Bontecou Effect This year saw a spate of important retrospectives by women artists (Lee Bontecou, Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas) who came of age in the '60s and early '70s. Great news for all of us. But widespread response to Bontecou's traveling exhibition, however positive, highlighted a troubling phenomenon I call the "Bontecou Effect": when a female artist "of a certain age" is considered by the art world to be missing in action--even though she's been plugging away in her studio for decades--and interest in her work is resuscitated only by a force of institutional grace. This is the reality that women artists of her generation face.

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3 "The Way We Work" (Southern Exposure, San Francisco) The group show has of late evolved into the "group" group show, as in the case of this provocative exhibition of international collectives curated by Courtney Fink and Kristen Evangelista. Indeed, this evolution has been accompanied by a change in the very nature of collectivity in art. Art historians often associate collectivism with the self-assured polemics of the avant-garde--Futurism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. But artists' renewed efforts to collaborate today, whether by deploying the radio or the Internet, the archive (as in work here by United Net-Works) or the lowly placemat (Red76), represent a real paradigm shift. The new projects communicate less artistic certainty than a precarious desire for connection in these dangerous days with what some might call the multitude.

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4 Shanghai, Capital of the Twenty-first Century On a recent trip to Shanghai, I learned that the reality of a "globalized" art world lies not so much with the specific achievements of artists, nor their international renown, as with the startling range of venues available for doing business. As befits its reputation as the new global megalopolis, the city turns out both glamour and grunge in equal measure, its economic ladder spanning the range of capitalist endeavor. From the luxe, Michael Graves-designed Shanghai Gallery of Art to the grittier spaces and studios at Suzhou Creek, one thing is clear: Consumer choice is the leitmotif of a free-market art world, whether in China or Chelsea.

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5 Deerhoof Art rock: an oxymoron for the ages. Enter the Bay Area's Deerhoof, the best argument for the genre. In this year's concept album Milk Man (Kill Rock Stars/5 Rue Christine), a twisted narrative about milk deliveries and missing children, all the tropes of angular, art school/experimental music were in place. Live, singer/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki performs with plush toys shaped like fruit and sings about pandas. But when the band starts rocking--especially the brilliantly frenetic drummer Greg Saunier--it is your body, not your sense of aesthetics, that embraces that old rock 'n' roll truism: Fuck art, let's dance.

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6 The Smithson Juggernaut He was everywhere this year--patron saint to a younger generation of crystal-obsessed artists at the Whitney Biennial; object of art historians' archaeological fascination in a perpetual land-slide of books; and subject of a landmark traveling retrospective organized by Eugenie Tsai and Connie Butler. Not bad for an artist whose most famous work, Spiral Jetty, 1970, has been seen in the flesh by a mere handful of visitors, relatively speaking. Today's Smithson, however, is decidedly less monumental than his Earthworks might suggest. The shattered mirrors and distorted perspectives of his mid-'60s sculptures are apt reflections of our own cracked sensibilities--our collective struggle to make sense of a progressively fractured view of the present.

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7 The Battle of Algiers It says something about the vicious-circle logic of our times that this year's best statement on war, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, was made in 1965. This fictionalized account of the Algerian resistance, rereleased in a newly restored print, draws a timeless portrait of uprising and occupation. Fahrenheit 9/11 may have made for better box office, but Algiers speaks with more profound historical gravitas to the long-range effects of the "war on terror."

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8 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central) That a TV comedy show could win a Peabody Award for its coverage of the 2000 presidential election speaks as much to the contemptible state of news media as it does to the spot-on satire of the show's writers. And Stewart's take on politics only got better this time. (Or worse, depending on how you look at it.)

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9 "Ant Farm 1968-1978" (Berkeley Art Museum) Curated by Constance Lewallen and Steve Seid, this year's retrospective of Ant Farm, the Bay Area's experimental architecture and video collective, perfectly illustrated just how short is the distance traveled between media utopia and dystopia. From sly performances and videos such as The Eternal Frame, 1975--their parodic restaging of the Zapruder footage--to loopy proposals for communing with dolphins, Ant Farm walked the line between the ecstasy of communication and the lurking dangers of the control society. We're still walking with them.

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10 Bruce Nauman, Raw Materials (Tate Modern, London) We've come to expect monumentality from the Tate's Unilever Series: Think Olafur Eliasson's vast, eternal dawn or Louise Bourgeois's monstrous arachnids. Hence the great surprise (perhaps relief) of Nauman's aural collage, on view through March 28, which draws from his archive of noise to produce a haunting, cacophonous echo chamber in the museum's gargantuan space. In a world dominated by visual spectacle, Nauman's soundscape reminds us of its creepy, whispering underbelly: a material void no less insidious for all its apparent emptiness.

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Pamela M. Lee is associate professor of art history at Stanford University. She is the author, most recently, of Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, which was published in spring 2004 by MIT Press.

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Hamza Walker

1 "Sons et Lumieres" (Centre Pompidou, Paris) Breaking the mold of hackneyed exhibitions addressing parallels between visual art and music (think of the tired example of painting and classical music--or worse, jazz), this exceptional show, curated by Sophie Duplaix and Marcella Lista and on view through January 3, instead examines relationships between light and sound. Broad? Yes. But generous enough to survey the whole of the twentieth century--from Frantisek Kupka to Pierre Huyghe--proposing it as a period of open-ended experimentation rather than ever-narrowing medium specificity.

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2 Albert Ayler, Holy Ghost (Revenant Records) Released the first week of October, this nine-CD treasure trove of previously unissued and rare recordings by legendary free-jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler was the perfect antidote to Halloween's spiritual bankruptcy. The haunting transcendence of Ayler's music aside, his career is rightfully the stuff of myth, from his travels throughout Europe to his mysterious death by drowning in 1970 at the age of thirty-four. At times I mistook my stereo for a Ouiji board.

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3 Christine Tarkowski, "proposals for indestructible living" (mn gallery + studio, Chicago) Under the reign of Daley II, Chicago has undergone a dramatic renovation, culminating this summer with the opening of Millennium Park, which features a flashy band-shell and bridge by Frank Gehry. By instead paying tribute to the sorrowful postwar housing vernacular that stretches for miles along the city's north- and southwest corridors, Tarkowski's metal bas-reliefs, cast from distressed vinyl siding of the type found on any Chicago bungalow, are a reminder of just how much of this town is immune to hoopla.

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4 Kim Fisher (Shane Campbell, Chicago) An initial encounter with Fisher's paintings left me uncertain as to whether I was dealing with a wild card or a crazy diamond, I now see it was the latter, which I can only bid to shine on. Fisher has concentrated the wacky energy of her previous body of work into smaller, shaped canvases where geometric abstraction as an allegory of modernism (a proposition indebted to Peter Halley) crystallizes into unabashed jewels.

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5 Rodney Graham, Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (Donald Young Gallery, Chicago) Designed to extend a narrative fragment indefinitely, Graham's cinematic works often induce in me the uncanny sense that I am trapped in a particular chapter of modernity running as a film loop. This of course is their strength. Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 has the feel of a requiem cut from the same anachronistic cloth Graham has been weaving for the past fifteen years. As the dust or snow settled on the pristine vintage typewriter, I didn't feel as though my soul was being released so much as gently rested.

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6 Albert Oehlen (Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York) Having staked out a middle ground for painting, Oehlen can be counted on to deliver a batch of canvases every few years with neither justification nor excuses. Designations like good, bad, or ugly are secondary to their simply being paintings whose quality, for what it's worth, is allowed to ebb and flow. In this instance, the surf was up.

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7 Charles Burns, Black Hole (Fantagraphics Books) Burns's ability to hit the proverbial psychosexual nail on the head made the inclusion of pages from his magnum opus, the twelve-issue comic-book series Black Hole, a must in Robert Storr's investigation of "the grotesque" in this year's SITE Santa Fe Biennial. With a noirish sensibility that harks back to the golden age of the horror genre and a story line following a group of plague-ridden teenagers in '70s Seattle, this staunchly black-and-white glossy never fails to tap into those libidinally based fears commonly known as the willies. As its last installment is released this month, I can finally praise this macabre gem as a whole, or hole, as the case may be.

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8 Lee Bontecou (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) Unlike, say, Paul Thek, Bontecou was not overlooked as much as she was frozen in time. If the permanent collection at the Art Institute of Chicago is any indication, then Bontecou's metal-and-fabric reliefs never wholly disappeared from sight. In the context of that installation, her works have a constant funk factor, meaning they are as funky now as they were in the '60s, making them truly unruly period pieces. But seeing these signature sculptures contextualized within her oeuvre in this retrospective, curated by Elizabeth Smith of MCA Chicago with Ann Philbin of the UCLA Hammer Museum, one could make sense of a broader trajectory that incorporated naive ecological motifs a la Jacques Cousteau, entirely apart from either strictly feminist or formalist concerns.

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9 Catherine Sullivan, Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land (S.W.A.P. Polish Army Veteran's Association, Chicago, Apr. 2). This freaky slag-heap of performance-cum-escapade had no choice but to be grueling for audience and actors alike, given its nested source material--Two Captains, the 1939 novel by Soviet writer Veniamin Kaverin, which in turn served as the basis for Nord-Ost, the play being staged when Chechen rebels took an entire Moscow theater audience hostage in 2002. For Sullivan's detractors who simultaneously decry the lack of politics in contemporary art, the only words I have are, "This ain't no party, this ain't no disco."

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10 DNA, DNA on DNA (No More Records) As a young punk in Baltimore in the early '80s, I was weaned on the righteousness of DC's Dischord label. In contrast, the bands coming out of New York were a seriously dark brew whose fans always struck us as creepy if not outright violent. Seminal No Wave bands like Mars and DNA didn't answer to ideology. Thank God! As a result, I have been spared a sense of nostalgia when listening to this thirty-two-track compilation representing DNA's total output. As for band members Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori, beautiful buds made for beautiful blossoms. It's in the genes, so to speak.

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Hamza Walker is associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

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Robert Rosenblum

1 "Andy Warhol: The Late Work" (Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz) In a year that honored our pantheon of twentieth-century deities (see below), two Warhol shows soared high. Organized by Mark Francis and Jean-Hubert Martin for Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, "The Late Work" buried stale prejudices that favor '60s over '70s and '80s Warhol by offering an eye-popping spectacle of little-known work, including mural-size crosses and knives, replays of Pollock's drip paintings as tangled yarn, and takes on Arp's and Kelly's organic contours as the flattened profiles of a dozen supermarket eggs. These fresh vistas should soon prompt new excavations into Late Warhol-land.

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2 "Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits" (Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland) Like Picasso's ever-expanding universe, Warhol's can constantly be seen from new angles, in this case through the lens of self-portraiture. As evidenced in Dietmar Elger's show, Warhol subjected this abiding theme to an overwhelming range of variations, from intimate photographs to wallpaper murals that completely undo the concept of self-portraiture with decorative assembly-line repetition. The psychological spectrum is no less broad, with its constant shifting from total concealment to shrill revelation--both guises, of course, being theatrical deceptions.

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3 "Joan Miro: La Naissance Du Monde" (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) Another Miro show? We all know he's great, but curator Agnes de la Beaumelle's exhibition, concentrating on the 1920s, resurrected his tonic genius even for those familiar with it for decades. Seeing him move from Cubist earth to Surrealist skies as he soared like a bird across ethereal expanses of color was like watching a supersonic takeoff. An old love reborn.

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4 Willem de Kooning (Gagosian Gallery, New York) A similar story. In this career-long anthology, perfectly selected by David Whitney for the artist's centennial, the ubiquitously venerated master was suddenly brought back to life. Beginning at the end, the show moved from the supernal late works, with their triumph of weight-less spirit over juicy flesh, back down memory lane, passing one muse after another--Hamptons flatlands, the Long Island Expressway, urban floozies, ancient myth-through half a century of works bursting with the fertility of genius. From gritty head-on collisions of black and white to caught-in-the-act explosions of rainbow color, de Kooning's perpetuum mobile continues to astonish.

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5 "Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art" (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) Just as de Kooning can evoke the ghosts of the old masters, especially Hals and Rembrandt, so too can another rebel, Bacon. Here, he is revived by curator Barbara Steffens as a tradition-soaked painter who kept drawing on Titian, Velazquez, Ingres, and Van Gogh. This august company looked especially at home in the venerable corridors of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which provided a perfect genealogical setting for a painter who may now be the ultimate heir to museum-worthy traditions.

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6 Donald Judd (Tate Modern, London) Another refresher course from our historic canon, Nicholas Serota's Judd retrospective had the effect of a full-career Mondrian show, making an artist synonymous with Minimalism look maximal in complexity and variety. Judd's infatuation with the exquisite nuance of synthetic colors added even more contradictory layers to his puritan core. In a way, he represents his generation's update on Rothko's own paradoxical mixture of the monastic and the epicurean, moving from the ivory tower to the carpenter's shop and the factory.

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7 "Dali and Mass Culture" (Caixa Forum, Barcelona) This year marked not only de Kooning's centennial but Dali's, too, and the Spaniard loomed just as large. If right-thinking art people scorned Dali's love of publicity stunts, much as they thought his art pandered to a low-brow audience, this major aspect of his career was enthusiastically explored here. Like time travel through twentieth-century pop culture, the spectacular installation offered a trip that covered the Dream of Venus Pavilion at the 1939 New York, World's Fair, clips from Spellbound, projects for Disney films, and TV ads, not to mention luxury merchandise, like his eerie jewelry that often usurped the role of Catholic relics. Appropriately the show concluded with the master's joining up with a younger publicity hound, Warhol. Purists may sneer, but Dali gave us a preview of what's become commonplace commerce in the art world today.

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8 Karel Funk (303 Gallery, New York) An unforgettable miniature portrait gallery of eleven monkish aliens from the bleak world of North Face. These lonely survivors of a Manitoba winter are hidden presences, their faces to be guessed at beneath the protective gear of windbreakers and trucker hats. What we see most of are small patches of exposed skin and hair, rendered with a fanatical hyperrealism of stubble and pore that might make a Flemish primitive jealous.

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9 "Michael Craig-Martin: Surfacing" (Milton Keynes Gallery, Central Milton Keynes, UK) I confess I saw only the catalogue, not the show, but that was enough to celebrate the full-scale emergence of Craig-Martin as a spectacular muralist who can now command outdoor as well as indoor spaces. At Milton Keynes, he covered the pure rectangle of the gallery's facade with his signature mixture of psychedelic color--magenta clashing with turquoise--and a single utilitarian object: an outsize rendering of a metal filing-cabinet drawer. The effect, especially with the changing light of day, must be hallucinatory, a building transformed into a painting. The indoor murals, with their infinite proliferation of paper clips, lightbulbs, and cell phones, also dissolve reality. A big historical presence, Craig-Martin looms somewhere between Patrick Caulfield and Peter Halley.

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10 Vivienne Westwood (Victoria & Albert Museum, London) A breathtaking cornucopia of a delirious, postmodern imagination that not only ransacks centuries of historical costume but clothed the Sex Pistols, too. From punk to dix-huitieme siecle, Westwood juggles both past and present with the same zeal for the outrageously over the top. And you could even see the very shoes that tripped up Naomi Campbell on the catwalk.

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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. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

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