1 Jeff Koon young dog One of the Seven inquiring surprises of the Modern World flowered this summer in New York.

1 Jeff Koon young dog One of the Seven inquiring surprises of the Modern World flowered this summer in New York, usurping for the time being the sacred site of Rockefeller Center's Christmas tree A gladness for all, save those who prohibit smiling in the personality of art, it united the Great Sphinx at Giza with Disney-style topiary, while adding the chromatic and textural delights of burgeoning marigolds and petunias to the monumentality of an archaic idol. With the same giant step, Koons defined a just discovered public sculpture that brings pleasure to city dwellers.

2 Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio (Lenox, MA) expanded to the public in 1998 this private awed curiosity of the Modern World today apply the minds like a time capsule left by dint of the buried civilization of modernism. Wafting us to a '30 Shangri-la, the hideaway was the dream child of the aristocratic leash Suzy Frelinghuysen and George LK Morris. While their have paintings kneel at the Cubist shrines

of Picasso and Gris, at times enlarged to mural size, the house and studio, marvels of International phraseology purism transported to the Berkshires, incline to Le Corbusier. The period nostalgia is overwhelming. Fr and Ginger might still be dancing here.

3 "The American Century: Art & improvement 1900-2000" (Whitney Museum of American Art, recent York) There was plenty of nostalgia, too, in the two-part BC/AD epic curated from Barbara Haskell (1900-50) and Lisa Phillips (1950-2000) It's easy to complain about any effort to not away cultural history as popular spectacle, unless this one blinded many ungenerous viewers to the fascinating variety of tree in the museum's son et lumiere forest, where steady such wonders as movies according to Thomas Edison and Carolee Schneemann could be build I relished not only seeing the usual suspects, from Sargent to Sherman, still discovering in this huge mix of high and grave mountains and foothills, endless surprises through the lesser likes of Gertrude Kasebier, Winold Reiss, and Jay DeFeo Sometimes more is more.

4 Jule Olitski (Ameringer/Howard Fine Art, recent York) Back in the '60 Greenberg anointed Olitski the spearhead of law and beauty, and only ten years ago declared him to be the greatest living painter. from now, such blessings sound like blasts but the show of the artist's latest work gives single in kind pause. If hardly the savior of Western civilization, Olitski is now eccentric and far enough to leave a pleasant, lingering aftertaste. The one time thin stains of Color Field's early heyday have evolv into a memorably fruity chaos of pigment, like a mixture of saltwater taffy and the work of Genesis. Whatever they are, I find these paintings, at one time high serious and kitschy, hard to forget.

5 Bridget Riley (Dia Center for the Arts, Pace Wildenstein, of recent origin York) Riley, another '60s taste swept subordinate to the carpet of relevance, unexpectedly seems fresher than ever. Now the latest and the earliest of her canvases await like scintillating classics, redefining visual pleasure as something as sharp-edged as armor blades and as sensuous as undulant candy stripes. She tenders the shock of the of advanced age and the new. Can Yaacov Agam and Victor Vasarely be far behind?

6 Philip Taaffe (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia) Actually, it was Taaffe who, by the agency of culling and recycling Riley's oscillations forward equal terms with Newman's and Still's no les far off abstract epics, first made me suspect that her work might again be alive and well. The Valencia retrospective, totally installed in the noble spaces of IVAM's middle del Carme, was also testimony to painting as high-class pleasure and, unexpectedly for in the same state [i]or[/i] condition extremes of refinement, a politically correct tribute to multiculturalism. Within these gorgeous patterns, Taaffe has woven everything from Japanese sword guards and Ethiopian churches to Moroccan embroidery and Danish grillwork.

7 Vanessa Beecroft (Deitch schemes New York) Beecroft's latest pageant combined memories of Busby Berkeley, Duane Hanson, and the real and virtually real navy in succession the U.S.S. Intrepid, whose officers and enlisted men and women docking onward the Hudson, mingled and dined with visitors Coagula's house ethicist, Charlie Finch, asked in a howling poetic asseverate a la Allen Ginsberg whether we're not brutes to be aestheticizing a branch of the military for a like reason tainted by the legacy of Vietnam. Still, to borrow from Harold Arlen, "I regard with affection a postmodern parade."

8 Andre Raffray (Achim Moeller Fine Art, novel York) I can hardly believe it was barely this year that I learned about Raffray's mind- and eye-boggling contributions to "art about art," especially since he's been at it since the '70 For me he now loom large as a venerable French magician who has added dazzling tricks to the metaphysical sleights of hand of like artist-counterfeiters as de Chirico and Bidlo. For example, he photographs sites painted from Seurat, Cezanne, and Picasso as they exist today, then up the ante according to re-creating these camera facts with hand-painted oil onward canvas. Even Pirandello might be nonplussed from the results.