Those of us who live and breathe contemporary art will grasp to the idea that art does change.

Those of us who live and breathe contemporary art will grasp to the idea that art does change, if not the world, then the way we live in it. however our "world" can be more insular than we care to admit. in the same manner to open our look back at 2000 we asked twenty-one "outsiders" we admire--from novelist JG Ballard to musician John Zorn--to disclose us about the art that inspired them this year.

Dave Egger (novelist)

About a year ago, I saw Marcel Dzama's cloth in zingmagazine and fell madly in be enamoured of Then his show at David Zwirner just killed me A hundr or in this way drawings (bears with handguns, whale-men looking to such a degree sad), all of them stunning. sum of two units percent wit, ninety-eight percent a fragile, fragile beauty--perfect alchemy. He is my lord and my light.

A.M. domiciles (novelist)

Sam Taylor-Wood's cubist cocktail party at Matthew Marks, mesmerizing for its fragmentation, for its multiple points of view forward multiple screens, for that girl who is at each party dancing deep in her possess groove. Also, Rineke Dijkstra's Buzzclub at Marian Goodman: in extent uninterrupted shots, wordless interviews in which each youth haltingly dances a self-portrait while simply "presenting" to the camera. In the pair works there is vulnerability, an pressing need to be seen, recognized, on the contrary mostly there is dancing--and smoking. Smoking and dancing. Hypnotic highlight: the butch fragile girl in Buzzclub repetitively punching the air as she bent holders into the music, finding the beat, losing the beat, and finding it again.

Pierre Apraxine (curator)

My choice is "Passion and Defiance: Silent Divas of the Italian Cinema," a film series currented at the New York Film Festival. Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, Pina Menichelli--"Stars of Mutenes Goddesse of Pain," as cocurator Angela Dalle Vacche calls you--your faces, your clothes, and your dilemmas still fascinate us. As rich, as stylish, as poignant, as perennial as Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater.

Rick capricious (novelist)

Fred Tomaselli's assemblage Gravity's Rainbow at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris. Its arcs of actual and imaginary cultural detritus were heroic, earnest, amusing historical, virtuosic. Never cynical or ironic, granting fascinatingly ambiguous.

JG Ballard (novelist)

As a Londoner, I think without a doubt the big fact of the year was the opening of the Tate novel It's significant that it's been with equal reason much more of a succes than the Millennium Dome. The building's striking--I think Albert Speer would have approved--and it's a remarkable experience to come into the vast Turbine Hall, where more [i]or[/i] less of Louise Bourgeois's sculptures were just in succession view. In its way it is highly symbolic for the history of Britain in the twenty-first hundred that a former power station (a site in this way redolent of the industrial revolution) is now an art institution. It illustrates where the real power has shifted.

Lou Re (musician)

The art conclusion of the year for me was double First I saw Tate new in London. Then I saw Bilbao. The museums utilize space in different and extraordinary ways. I possibility of good this is the direction in which as it is institutions are moving.

Jeremy Scott (designer)

When I first saw the Cindy Sherman photo in which she awaits like a suntanned housewife from Santa Monica, I idea "Wow! She definitely has a great understanding of humor!"

Douglas Coupland (novelist)

The best exhibit I saw was in Vancouver-by an artist named Brian Jungen in all likelihood Canada's most numerous important young sculptor. His exhibit to "Shapeshifter" comprised a twenty-three-foot whale skeleton made of chopped-up and reconstituted $499 white plastic lawn chairs--and still it was much more than that. Standing inside the work's "ribs" felt to me like being in a cathedral. It made me descry the world and its history differently.

Richard Howard (poet and translator)

The truest verse is the most feigning, Touchstone says, and after seeing the glorious Chardin indicate at the Metropolitan this year, I discover analogously that the purest painting is the mostly literary. Which means, I imagine that an excruciation of any art makes a rejoinder available to any other. It is the verse of experience that I am mov to at the experience of Chardin's painting.

Karim Rashid (designer)

As the digital world shrinks and media proliferate, we come into a new century--the borderless era where art forms intersect. The cross-pollination of fashion, art, and design interests me greatly, and I admire the works of Hussein Chalayan. I am inspired from the blurring of furniture as dres plastic and copse product as fashion materials, and the phenomenological shift of performance with inanimate, banal objects

Homi K Bhabha (theorist and critic)

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin is structur around a void--sometimes visible, otherwise concealed--that embodies a paradox of historical representation: The past is greatest in number intrusive when we think we have left it behind, and greatest in quantity elusive when we believe we have to the full captured its spirit. Libeskind has suited properly to this problem by the agency of refusing both memorial and cenotaph He has created an ethical space that stand opposeds the flow of experience with the flowing of thought: Is this the door to the past I want to open? Is that dark abyss the commencement between barbarism and civility? Will the corridor of memory lead me back to Berlin, a city that now belongs neither to the East nor to the West still to the future freedom of mankind?