Two Thousand Four

The end-of-year blah-blah-blah, in a more or less top-ten format, behind the cut. See you in ought-five.

Minimalism. From the bicoastal celebrations to the exceptional and comprehensive Dan Flavin retrospective, minimalism ruled 2004. The year also marked the deaths of Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt, losses that Miguel Sánchez aptly described as feeling "like a door slamming shut."

The Atlantic Monthly. The transformation of The Atlantic Monthly from a journal of letters comparable in scope to Harper's to a magazine of note in political affairs may better qualify for a previous year's review. It was editor Michael Kelly who set these efforts in motion before his early passing in April 2003. The new format saw its full fruition in this year—from its remarkable letters-to-the-editor section to issue after issue of relevant reads by a core ensemble of James Fallows, Caitlin Flanagan, Ken Pollack, Christina Nehring, and Mark Bowden, this is the single magazine I'd like delivered to my deserted island.

Philip Roth, The Plot Against America. It is not by any stretch Roth's strongest novel. But it is an excellent meditation on the bifabricated nature of political observation: that any one event (or administration) in America can spur two interpretations that are not only distinct but bear no common factual intersection. By the end of the novel, liberals will decry the fascistic policies of the Lindbergh administration, and neocons will see yet another instance of liberal paranoia expressed among the hate-America-first crowd as an eagerness to describe national security policies as nascent Nazism. Sound familiar?

Abraham the Patriarch. I'd say that Jesus Christ made gains in America during ought-four, and Mohammed certainly kept his ground elsewhere. But isn't it Abraham whose status is continually emphasized by religious politics and strife throughout the world? A significant global player, Abraham. All indicators show another big year for him in 2005.

John Currin. Some time ago, I saw Martin Amis speak on a book tour, and the question was raised to him regarding the direction of literature in the wake of postmodernism. Amis's answer struck me as weak and safe: that literature would return to its storytelling roots. There's an unfortunate assumption that art moves epicyclically, venturing forth in periods of experimentation but always doubling back to a home-plate style, be it representational painting or traditional literary narrative. Movements change, but art never moves in this way.

That was the sentiment I identified in Jerry Saltz's passing comment on John Currin: "I hope never to hear the following oft repeated, mind-numbing inanity again, whether it's applied to John Currin, Paul P., Tim Gardner, Delia Brown, Graham Little or whoever: 'They have such skill.'" I appreciate Currin and I like the renewed interest and emphasis on representation and painting, but emphatically not because I think it signifies a resurgence in craftsmanship after a wacky period of anything-goes art. But that's the debate, and whatever your opinion of (to quote Kim Levin) "our premier mannerist," Currin has to be acknowledged as figuring heavily in that conversation.

Hollywood Agendas. Fahrenheit 911 versus The Passion of the Christ. Your local cinema megaplex henceforth became the biggest megaphone of them all.

Sexy Art. Walter Robinson:

As for the guys, well, they like women, too. Funky fashion photog Terry Richardson took the art world by storm with a show at Deitch Projects of sex pictures that gave new license to the notion of licentiousness. Lower East Side erotic auteur Richard Kern, with his new kinky photos at Feature Inc., managed to point his camera down the blouse and up the skirt in the same picture. And Timothy Greenfield-Sanders introduced hard-core porn stars to polite society with his color portrait photographs at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea. “Art in New York is obsessed with sex!” said German critic Barbara Weidle, after a month-long stint in the Artnet offices.

But the most radical artistic gesture of all -- and curiously, the most trivial -- belonged to Andrea Fraser, the “institutional critique” artist whose video at Fredrich Petzel Gallery chronicled a special kind of performance -- her having sex with a collector, reportedly for $20,000. In the end, Simone de Beauvoir was right -- “woman is sex.” Complain about chauvinism all you like, this kind of thing still represents eros, the life force, the one universal positive.

Dark Horses. From the awarding of the Pritzker Prize to Zaha Hadid to the entire list of candidates for the National Book Award. Only Bill Murray bucked the trend.

Post-Soviet Revolutions. From the Rose Revolution in Georgia to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the palette of 2004 was decidedly post-Red. (Here's hoping for a burnt orange victory tomorrow in the Rose Bowl to kick off a similar trend in 2005.)

The Cicadas. Which comes last because they swarmed so few regions, but if you missed out on Brood X, you really missed out on quite a phenomenon.

. . . and all of you. OK, so I'm out of pithy observations for the year. Truth be told, I think there's probably something to the claim that 2004 will come to be seen as the golden age of the blogosphere. (I'm thinking that even my parents will have one by this time next year.) But the internets have been a fun place this year and will still be so tomorrow, I hope. Thanks for stopping by and have some safe fun tonight.