CORNELIA PARKER artist, represented by the Frith Street Gallery, London
My cultural highlights for 2007 are 'The Waves', directed by Katie Mitchell at the National Theatre in London; Wangari Maathai speaking at the RSA, 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy; Guiseppe Arcimbaldo at the Musee du Luxemboug, Paris, and Georg Bazelitz at the Royal Academy in London.
MICHAEL HOPPEN director of the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London, specialising in the sale and exhibition of 19th, 20th and 21st century photography
I loved a small show at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris called 'Towards Reportage'. The theme of the exhibition is social reportage and its beginnings. It shows how photographers through the 19th century viewed factory workers, artisans, farm labourers, the poor and the dispossessed, and even communities barely touched by western civilisation. There were the most beautiful and extraordinary early images by Charles Négre, Félix Thoillier (my personal favourite from the show) and others. Some well known, but many I have never seen before. A perfect and beautifully curated show.
MORGAN FALCONER New York-based critic and regular Saatchi Online correspondent
1 / Project for a Revolution in New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Curated by superman science-teacher and gallerist Mitchell Algus, this summer show gathered together a selection of neglected European artists from the 1960s and 1970s and delivered a dazzling and revelatory counter-history, suggesting what contemporary art might have looked like if New York had not stolen the idea of modern art. Jet-fuelled mega-museums rarely manage curating like this.
2 / Citizens and Kings, Royal Academy of Arts, London
It seems hardly creditable that I can't have seen a single impressive museum show of contemporary art this year, but true or not, this survey of portraiture from the late eighteenth century through to the early nineteenth, trampled on all latter day contenders. To see individuals striving again and again to find new styles to stage themselves and the times they lived in, and marching forward from the imperial to the democratic, was heartening and, well, just human.
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