JERRY SALTZ, Senior Art Critic for New York magazine, a two-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and a regular contributor to Saatchi Online's magazine.
1. Tino Sehgal at Marian Goodman, New York
I often see shows I don't like, but this was the only show I've ever seen that didn't like me. Last winter at Marian Goodman, Tino Sehgal had performers stand in the rear room of this gallery and discuss art and Western thought. Viewers were acknowledged as they entered and were occasionally included in conversations. After I answered one of the performers, he basically upbraided me. I was horrified, mortified, and thrilled.
2. Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) at the Met, New York
The most mind-blowing work I saw all year was at the Met, a long stretch of a 740-foot scroll by the Chinese master Wang Hui depicting an emperor's 1,700-mile journey made in 1698. It walks through mountains, lakes, palaces, and everyday scenes--people weaving, selling rice, walking dogs--plus the emperor's arrival, deploying landscapes and figures in myriad imaginative spatial perspectives and atmospherics. It's a machine of sheer pleasure.
3. Pipilotti Rist at MoMA, New York
Rist's enveloping MoMA video was the trippiest, most visually alluring installation seen in New York since Rudolf Stingel's aluminum-foil room at the Whitney last season. Vibrant images of flowers, blood, earthworms, and nudes covered the walls. Rist mixed the essences of modernism, Matisse's colors, and Picasso's forms with her own sensuous sensibility.
4. Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, New York
With no pictures of spring chickens in sight and crow's-feet the order of the day, the perennially shape-shifting avenging angel of photography donned the psyches of aging women torn by conflicting social proscriptions and inner yearnings. For an artist who has set up such narrow parameters, it's amazing Sherman isn't making boring, narcissistic pictures.
5. Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings, New York
For this solo show at Reena Spaulings, Liden built a wall containing a narrow doorway inside the gallery. That portal led to a dark living room, where, if you listened, you'd hear pecking, scratching, and cooing from above. It turned out the artist had left the gallery windows open and pigeons were roosting atop the enclosed living room. It was creepy and mysterious--as scintillating as an Edgar Allan Poe novel.
6. Jeffrey Wells at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
For his sleeper show, Wells projected barely visible auras of light, shifting blips, and flickering effects on the white walls and onto the furnishings. Visitors experienced the vision that happens without lenses, the glitches, negative images, flashes, and floaters our eyes produce.
7. Fia Backström at White Columns, New York
In her White Columns outing, Backström mined the scraps of her life, using art by friends, copies of e-mails, texts, and other bits of print. In the process, she transformed appropriation art for the Web era, saying (as one bit of her text puts it), "Sometimes words are more than enough, or not sufficient at all."
8. Carroll Dunham at Skarstedt Gallery, New York
A survey of Dunham's paintings from the eighties illustrated the ways this artist carried on a shamanic call-and-response between his inner self and his materials. He didn't just paint over wood; he painted in concert with it, augmenting grain, knots, and irregularities--in a sense, speaking with trees and art history. His technique paved the way for many artists who used material as a living thing rather than just something to cover up.
9. The Olympics: Opening and Closing Ceremonies
Two performances were as far as possible from the gallery system, but both sent a big message: China rules. On 8/8/08, in one of the most terrifyingly totalitarian events ever organized, the Beijing Olympics began with 15,000 perfectly synchronized performers. Sixteen days later, Great Britain laid out a sad pastiche: a double-decker bus, Jimmy Page playing "Whole Lotta Love," and David Beckham kicking a football into the crowd. No comparison.
10. "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns?" at Tony Shafrazi, New York
Alternative spaces staged a lot of good group shows this year, from Sculpture Center's "We Burn, We Shiver" to "Minus Space" at P.S. 1. But the gold goes to "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns?" at Tony Shafrazi, where aesthetic hierarchy ran wild, art hung over pictures of other art, and Shafrazi nearly apologized for vandalizing Guernica--then didn't.
Honorable Mention: The New Museum's surveys of painters Tomma Abts, Mary Heilmann, and Elizabeth Peyton. These shows impressed all the more at a time when the cards are still odiously stacked against women artists. Case in point: This fall, of 240 solo shows of living artists in 300 contemporary New York art galleries just 31% were by women.
Worst of:
1. As art museums face hard times and institutions are forced to consider canceling or postponing shows due to lack of funs, two exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum stand out as examples of curatorial irresponsibly and wastefulness. The Cai Guo-Qiang survey, curated by Thomas Krens, featured flying tigers and cars tumbling from the ceiling, and was exactly the kind of flashy spectacle museums became enamored of over the last decade. Currently there's "theanyspacewhatever," curated by Nancy Spector. Reportedly this show took a ridiculously long four years to curate and cost over a million dollars. Both shows were textbook cases of insularity, self-satisfaction, empty showmanship, and aesthetic narrowness.
2. Andreas Serrano's exhibition of large color photographs of human and animal excrement at the Yvon Lambert Gallery was one of the following:
a. Good idea; Bad work.
b. Bad idea; Bad work.
c. An attention-getting fizzle by a legendary shock-meister.
d. Shit
3. Nate Lowman on his own is a good artist. But his collaboration with Dan Colen at Maccarone Gallery, featuring a beat-up car filled with electronic equipment, and sundry half-hearted efforts here and there was an illustration of what happens when young artists are told that everything they do is cool and that they should do whatever they want because it will be cool and it will sell. Hopefully, this dismal show marked the end of the four-year long Boys-in-Black-and-Silver school of quasi-nihilist pseudo-punk art.
4. Subodh Gupta has often been called "the Damien Hirst of India;" like that's such a great thing. Whatever, his show at Shainman Gallery this year featured a lot of shiny sculptures of kitchen utensils, huge bronze heads, and other hideous looking objects that proved that one Damien Hirst is all that is necessary. Gupta was little more than a chance for moneyed collectors with nothing else to spend money on to buy something large, metallic, and simple.
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