Ten things I liked about 2008.
I promised myself I wouldn’t Tumble anything new until I posted some sort of ‘08 wrap-up (look at me being all resolution-y), just to kind of sign, seal and shelve the events of the last year. So here are ten things I thought were just swell.
10. Björk’s Volta Tour
Best live act, best opening acts, most ambitious stage show, outrageous costumes, confetti, oh my!
09. Ólafur Elíasson
Between his breathtaking waterfalls and bi-coastal MoMA retrospective, he commanded the attention of American art lovers throughout the year.
08. Kehinde Wiley
There was not a month last year Wiley’s work was not featured in a major exhibition. With the Africa series he displayed a refreshing new take on his style, and later the Deitch show put everything back into perspective.
07. Summertime
This summer seriously felt like the summer you graduate from high school. It was a too-fun-to-be-real countdown to everything changing. Again. Ah, to be young.
06. Cy Twombly
I’m not going to sit here and say Notes From Salalah was life-changing. I wouldn’t even count these among his best works. However, this was the year I re-discovered Cy Twombly, and discovered, perhaps for the first time, how to appreciate him.
05. Gang Gang Dance
Favorite album of the year. A perfect meld of tribal and technology, along with never-disappointing album art.
04. Barack Obama
Enough said.
03. Light Installations
Those of you who read this often, or often-ish know that I cannot resist a good light installation, the more large-scale the better. It’s not just light as a medium that fascinates me, but also the Tumblr community’s response to it. People who aren’t even interested in art are re-blogging some of the more spectacular photos and broadening their definition of “what-is-art?” This, to me, is a very, very, very good thing.
02. MONEY
Hedge fund billionaires turned Lloyds underwriters into paupers by putting body parts through their Picassos, while Damien Hirst sued 16-year-old starving art students from his impenetrable tower of thousand pound notes. And in the background, the world economy came crashing down around them all. High rollers like Javier Peres and whoever the hell turned up at the Hirst auction threw around a lot of money trying to convince the art market it had nothing to worry about amidst the looming depression, but dismal sales at the major art fairs in London and Miami delt the art world a cold, hard bitchslap back to reality. On the upside, though, it might just put Dash Snow out of business.
01(a). Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang’s New York City Guggenheim retrospective was the first major exhibition I saw last year, and the best. Perhaps it was the ridiculous romanticism surrounding the circumstances under which I saw this show, or just the insanely extrovert explosiveness of his work—I was seduced in every way possible.
01(b). Pipilotti Rist
Okay, so I haven’t seen this yet, but I can already tell it’s incredible! I can’t stop blogging/thinking about it! I honestly think that if we rounded up the leaders of the free world, took away their guns and shoes and made them sit in this room for a while, they would just be inspired to work everything out. How’s that for romance?
