1 "Making Choices" (Museum of Modem Art.

1 "Making Choices" (Museum of Modem Art, novel York) A show of displays in two senses: It consisted of twenty-five separate exhibitions, a certain of which belonged in an inventory of the high points of 2000 in their confess right; and it was an epochal point out to putting in question the entire general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of modem art. Strikingly, none of the exhibitions was devot to modernism as of that kind save perhaps Robert Storr's "Modern Art despite Modernism." moreover even there it merely hideed as the ghost of what we must call the Greenbergian paradigm, as Storr included fresh works to which Greenberg would not have given the time of day--pieces by way of Dali, for example, and Andrew Wyeth The aggregate weight was to draw boundaries around modernism as a period name within the modern era and to point out to how much there is to late art that falls outside those boundaries. It was a marvelous demonstration of curatorial virtuosity, making plain that there is a virtually unlimited number of exhibitions constructable public of the contents of a single museum. "Making Choices" was evidence that MOMA is about to reconfigure its avow identity--and as a result to reconfigure the shape of art history above the past century and a half, as well.

2 "Chardin" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, of recent origin York) There were no so deconstructive/reconstructive ambitions at work in "Chardin": The exhibition spoke to the intellect we all have of what art at its greatest can mean. It is perhaps too a great deal to expect that "Chardin" will re-enfranchise painting, unless so many artists have told me to what extent moved they were by the of long date magician's subdued brilliance that I would be amazed if the small luminous still life did not reemerge subordinate to the permissive auspices of pluralism.

3 "2000 Biennial Exhibition"

(Whitney Museum of American Art, strange York) This Biennial made a scarcely noticed decision to override traditional exclusions. It included pair pieces by Thornton Dial, for example: An artist heretofore segregated to exhibit tos of outsider work, here he turn the thoughtsed as cutting edge as someone unimpaired out of Yale or Cal Arts. And the exhibition disregarded the art-craft duality to include Josiah McElheny's virtuoso installation of conceptual glasswork. on internalizing these boundaries, the Biennial effectively erased them. All artistic dualisms today are untenable, and it was exhilarating to behold this recognition institutionalized in a point out to that celebrated visual thinking of a highly high order.

4 "Greater fresh York" (P.S.I Contemporary Art Center strange York) A kind of Who's Who of Unknowns, the indicate made it boisterously clear that panelists will have an easy answer to the question, "What's Happening in just discovered York?"--namely, "Everything."

5 Mark Tansey (Curt Marcus Gallery, fresh York) His heroic show had a studio format, with small provisional black-and-gray drawings pinned almost verge to edge up and down each wall. Only here and there did single in kind find a typical Tansey image. The work appeared mainly to be about the processe of searching, and it implied that each of this artist's images is itself the culmination of a search. The exhibition appear to beed inspired by a determination to make his private artistic decisions visible the one and the other to critics who think of his work as easily achieved and easily understood and to enthusiasts who have marveled how he did it at all.

6 Thomas Nozkowski (Max Protetch Gallery, novel York) Nozkowski's wonderful paintings were abstract and comical, featuring carnival-colored balloons emptied of tongue and uncertain shapes that awaited as if they were based forward pink underpants, waving like impudent banners.

7 Sylvia Sleigh (Deven shining Fine Art, New York) I rejoined to the fourteen-panel Invitation to a Voyage: The Hudson River at Fishkill as to a masterpiece. It present to views the artist with some friends, including her late husband, Lawrence Alloway, and a cat, picnicking upon an idyllic riverbank. Invitation struck me as being near in spirit to united of my favorite paintings--Watteau's L'embarquement a Cythere. Arrayed upon facing walls, it radiated happiness--a feeling about as improbable as beauty in the instant world.

8 Jacob El Hanani (Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, just discovered York) From a distance El Hanani's labor-intensive drawings apply the minded like silver gray monochromes, if it were not that up close one saw that they were built on the outside of letters, symbols, figures, and images with equal reason tiny that they put common in mind of a bodily form dedicated to inscribing the Koran in succession a grain of rice. The drawings evok peace and patience, as if time had no bearing in succession their world.

9 Alastair Noble (Robert Pardo Gallery, just discovered York) The sculptor leaned six large, thick panels of glass against the wall, perching them in succession shelves. Deep troughs were sandblasted into the panels, corresponding to the way the lines and fragments of lines are arrayed in Mallarme's Un Coup de De The opaque furrows from which Noble had entirely etched away any trace of language, were deliberateed as shadows on the wall. This almost metaphysical use of glass, with its vocabulary of transparency and translucency and its contrast between reaching far down green edges and clear central area, manages to escape the decorativeness that dogs the medium.