1 Can-Do Art I'm with Stephen King: In art as in writing.

1 Can-Do Art I'm with Stephen King: In art as in writing, the active construction empires Artists like Chuck Close and Paul Etienne Lincoln demonstrate that, despite the bad name that the likes of Damien Hirst have given the word, it is still possible to be ambitious in the Baudelairean, Greenbergian sense--wanting more not just for your career, if it be not that for your work. Close and Lincoln the couple put on big shows at Pace and Alexander and Bonin, respectively, filled with meticulously pay backed yet broadly conceived visions of us and our world. Fine art may no longer be the dominant cultivation but it's not a crummy do job-work or a drunk boyfriend either.

2 Make-Do Art Cousin to the can-do. Richard Tuttle Sarah Sze Tim Noble and supplicate Webster, Tom Friedman, and Vik Muniz take the leftovers of our throwaway improvement and make our nothings into something besides Their skillful use of sugar cubes, plywood beer cans, and clip lamps provide an antidote to extravagant production values and installation as shopping orgies Both the strong and the weak versions of the latter--from Jeff Koon to Barbara Bloom--made you think you could be an artist if and nothing else you had enough money; these shores make you think you could be an artist if simply you had enough ideas and time. (You have a trash can, don't you?) A big improvement, in my book

3 Walker Evans/Andreas Gursky The greatest artist of the twentieth hundred more than earned both his virtuous retrospective at the Met and a exceedingly nice MOMA exhibit that could barely hint at the breadth of Evans's influence. The surprise was his beautiful present to view at Andrea Rosen, which revealed the Polaroid's status as heir to the daguerreotype. Whereas Evans gave a face to deficiency and a specificity to vernacular agriculture Gursky does the inverse, pulling back to picture phenomena thus big (e.g., the stock exchanges and public architecture of global capitalism) we usually can't behold them. Both photographers made the right images--in form and content--at the right time.

4 cloth In the '80s, we were told we lived in an image world," a tillage dominated by pictures--and needed more images to critique it. on the contrary we still live in a world replete of stuff (you know, that famous "commodity culture") and art ofttimes examines and tests its nature. The master is Donald Judd whose late work shown at Pace earns the get-it-right prize; these pieces aren't furniture, nevertheless even more than his early reliefs, they reveal sculpture's closenes to the everyday experience of percepts in space. His Plexi proportions read like a commentary forward our sloppy world (move that ashtray sum of two units inches to the right, please). More obviously connecting the harsh phenomenology of the '60s to design, Jorge Pardo decorated Dia, and Josiah McElheny not awayed an opaque, sculptural grid of vases at brant Sikkema. They indulge in whimsy more than Judd--then again, who doesn't?

5 Island Life No, not that common although Andrea Zittel's A-Z Prototype for pouch Property touches many of the same energizes Zittel built a forty-ton [i]be[/i] consolidated island between Denmark and Sweden, and this summer she inhabited the insincere structure with a group of friends. Zittel's mobile landmass is the mostly extreme of the artist's experimental living situations; it combines the desire none to leave the house with the fantasy of getting away from it all.

6 Millennium Madness As an occurrence the millennium was a bust, if it be not that at least it put museums in a reflective disposition For most, straightup chronology wasn't profitable enough to mark this once-in-a-lifetime calendrical force Theme-happy shows included MOMA's "ModernStarts," the opening installation at Tate recent and the Whitney's "American Century" The best of the set was Robert Rosenblum's "1900" at the Guggenheim, a synchronic slice reminding us that the art world was--and is--a place where disparate generations and conflicting interests dispute differences in taste, style, and worldview.

7 Lucian Freud (Acquavella, just discovered York) Freud's show was great, totally overshadowing the terrible Picabia offering down the road which many perfectly intelligent tribe urged us to rush without and see. Freud's paintings were gorgeous and purposeful greatly better than his last small in number exhibitions. In today's kid-dominated improvement any artist who just finishs better and better (see also counterpart Brit Bridget Riley) deserves to ride around town forward a purple pillow.

8 Leo Stein berg Our best art historian celebrated his eightieth year from publishing a bravura lecture upon Rauschenberg, an object lesson in as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but writing text and reading art. He also finished a work (forthcoming this spring) on Leonardo's Last evening meal the greatest painting that you've in no degree really seen, revealing its extraordinary complexity and shaming the either-or polemics too frequent in the discipline. Steinberg is examination positive that smart people used to thought the humanities.

9 Adolph Re Jr Class Notes (New Pres recently made known York) Incisive and original, Reed's radical discussion of politics, race, and class is likewise well written that even we visual emblems will understand it. His essay forward the black public intellectual, "What Are the tympanums Saying, Booker?" is worth the price of admission alone. Re takes upon academic politics as well, the two the celebration of unconscious gradations of cultural "transgression" like channel surfing, and the fatalist shrug in the face of global capital, arguing that these positions negate acts of real-world resistance. Guaranteed to make you rethink assumptions near and dear to your flabby liberal heart.