1 "100 Days No Exhibition" (Salzburger Kunstverein) While the overriding bent among museums was to kick not upon the millennium with a publicity-grabbing bang.

1 "100 Days No Exhibition" (Salzburger Kunstverein) While the overriding bent among museums was to kick not upon the millennium with a publicity-grabbing bang, Kunstverein director Hildegund Amanshauser decided to darken her gallery spaces and innkeeper a hundred-day series of symposia questioning the basic assumptions underlying general curatorial practices. At a instant when the international circuit is glutt with clon exhibitions and pseudosensational displays "100 Days" was exemplary--offering possibility of good for a future beyond the knee-jerk reflexe of standard institutional fare.

2 Tom Friedman (Feature Inc., modern York) Friedman's splatter-film self-portrait as eviscerated corpse was single of the year's indelible images. Meticulously fabricated from colored construction paper, the chisel read like a metaphor for the violence of aesthetic experience. Looking at for what cause works of art can tear preconceptions to bits has been Friedman's stock-in-trade for years, notwithstanding that the deceptive impact of his pieces is typically engineered with plenitude of humorous ingenuity and a playfulness almost scientific in its precision.

3 Louise Bourgeois (Tate recent London) When Tate Modem explained last spring, the big attraction wasn't the collection on the other hand the former power plant's spectacular Turbine Hall, undoubtedly the greatest in number capacious museum lobby in the world. As a space for showing art, it is practically useless, however--unless an artist happens to posses the imaginative bravado of Bourgeois. Her triad of towers--I Do, I Undo, and I Redo--didn't impress at first sight, on the other hand their vertigo-inducing stairways and distorting mirrors giveed a nervy response to the hysteria generated from Tate Modem's space. And on accommodating just one person at a time, Bourgeois's configurations insisted that art is also a private adventure and a rewarding one for those willing to reciprocate the artist's risks--not to mention wait in line.

4 Paul McCarthy (Hannover Expo 2000) McCarthy's contribution to Expo 2000 has to be the most numerous fantastically weird and utterly disconcerting public carve ever to grace a world's fair. Boasting a vaginal orifice in addition to a jiggling phallic proboscis, the gigantic inflatable Chocolate Blockhead Nosebar exit towered above the surrounding attractions and national pavilions, suggesting a mutant version of Walt Disney's Pinocchio. The candy-bar vending machines placed subordinate to its hindquarters sweetened its monstrous sex appeal.

5 Jean-Luc Mylayne (The Photographers' Gallery, London) most numerous animal photography is thinly disguised eco-porn, still Mylayne is an extraordinary exception. This miniretrospective featured color prints from the past twenty years (stateside, a similar range of his work was seen at Barbara Gladstone), almost each one offering a surprising twist to his ongoing meditation onward the relationships among time, seeing, and photography. Whether blurring the outlines of his bird enthralls so that they assume a shimmering transparency or presenting starlings and robins as camouflaged details in the larger landscape, Mylayne devises a poignant sense of the precariousness of avian existence while also reflecting onward the contingency of our acknowledge visual experience.

6 Gregor Schneider (Wiener Secession, Vienna) In his hearth outside Cologne, Schneider constructed a cunning domestic doppelganger, building duplicate spaces within existing ones and leaving crawl spaces behind the false walls. For the Vienna exhibit he exported his rebuilt basement, a fire inspector's nightmare charged with shoddy wiring, dripping plaster, and dirt-smeared lamps. Entering the tiny doorway was like stepping in consequence of a Being John Malkovich-esque portal into the ultimate antimuseum space. Nothing otherwise out there matches the obsessiveness and psychological claustrophobia of Schneider's eerie aesthetic.

7 Michel Blazy (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) Visitors to the reopen Pompidou last January may have been vexed by a gallery where paint pare ed off the wall in blistering bagatelles and collected like ashes onward the floor. Blazy's modest notwithstanding profoundly resonant intervention could pass for a refractory abstract wall painting even as it serv up an ironic commentary onward the museum's slick refurbishing. And like other ephemeral works in his exhibit its materials simultaneously surrendered and retained their familiar identity. The accrues humbly derailed all ready-made answers persuasively inspiring viewers to leave behind the limits of either-or logic and embrace free from haughtiness wonders.

8 Anthony Hernandez (Grant Selwyn Fine Art, recently made known York and Los Angeles) Elegantly disturbing and rigorously fierce, Hernandez's "Pictures for Rome" series was a complete antidote to the ongoing like affair with the computer-driven architecture of hypercapitalism. Portraying the decaying viscera of aborted and abandoned buildings, these alluring, appalling images carefully behold the formal possibilities of economic collapse, disaster, and not care a straw for Recalling Smithson's Hotel Palenque slide display they uncover a quirky and at times sublime beauty in the distressed urban underworld they catalogue, prompting us to bring face to face our sometimes embarrassing capacity for finding delight in the fruits of los and ruin.