MORGAN FALCONER is a journalist and critic. He writes about contemporary art and culture for a variety of publications including the Times (London), Art World, Art Review and Frieze, and is one of Saatchi Online's regular New York correspondents.
After Nature, The New Museum, New York
There has been a lot of loud and campaigning environmentalist art, but until the New Museum show it didn't look like there was much by way of a genuine environmental poetic. Massimiliano Gioni's show was melancholy, moving and important.
Corin Hewitt, Whitney Museum, New York
A brilliant piece of talent spotting on the part of the Whitney. Photographer Hewitt set up a studio-cum-shed-cum kitchen in the galleries and displayed his strange Constructivist-inspired vegetable still lifes on the walls alongside.
Nicholas Poussin, Metropolitan Museum, New York
Sadly, Anthony Blunt and Brian Sewell were not to be seen swooning at this survey of the great man's landscapes, but many others did gape at their extraordinary serenity and ingenuity.
Jeff Koons, MCA Chicago and Metropolitan Museum, New York
Koons' Chicago outing was perhaps not the best mid-career survey Koons could have hoped for - the work looked cramped and jumbled - but his importance still shone through, and the balloon dog he installed on the roof of the Met was exquisite - a carnival Trojan horse.
Peter Doig, Tate Britain, London
It was oddly inspiring to see how hard Doig struggled in his early years to find his metier. But those clunky, overloaded pictures soon gave way to extraordinary masterstrokes which confirmed that he is indeed the greatest British painter of his generation.
Tom Sachs, Sperone Westwater and Lever House, New York
Sperone Westwater carved up their gallery into a warren of rooms for a show that demonstrated just how many styles and media Sachs can succeed in. And uptown, his Lever House installation was the best that building has seen for some time.
REBECCA GELDARD is a freelance writer and critic living in London.
Roger Hiorns' recent Artangel project 'Seizure'
A site-specific work within a condemned housing block that stands out as an extraordinary spatial intervention. The combination of otherworldly copper sulphate crystals, which covered all surfaces of a single flat, and the inherent domesticity of the architectural details underneath kept one mentally pivoting between gritty South London and the grotto.
Gail Pickering's 'Hungary! And Other Economies', at Gasworks, London
Pickering's wryly funny film, which charted the journey of porn actors in fake Pierre Cardin improvising Peter Weiss' 1963 play within a play 'Marat/Sade' while on a pilgrimage to a chateau that connected the famous sadomasochist and the fashion designer, may sound like hard work on paper but, in the flesh, made six-degrees-of-separation poetry out of cliched theatrical and unscripted human gestures.
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