Move over graffiti, impromptu street welding is the new mode of rebellion for disenfranchised urban youth. Manhattan got its first taste in the form of inaccessible public seating – a bench installed with risers 8 feet off the ground on an East Houston median. The Tall Bench lasted a week and its creators never came forth – a cryptic YouTube video records its creation and installation – but its moment in the bloglight made us reflect on the fleeting nature of public space in the churning city, and height-based discrimination.
Best Legal Public Art
Environmentalism is in, so P.S.1's self-referential summer courtyard-straddling urban farm P.F.1, the wacky work of WORK Architecture, is a natural choice. It's made with sustainable materials, softens the hard concrete edges and gravel grounds of P.S.1's front-yard, and yields actual crops! Badges for participation go to Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls, MoMA's pre-fab housing and the Spring's weird drill/realtime London-linkup on the Brooklyn waterfront.
Best Introduction to an Asia-Centric Art World
We all need to get used to Asia running things, and the Guggenheim's Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective was a good crash course on the Chinese art star's pyrotechnic performances and grandiose installations. Even the Murakami blockbuster at the Brooklyn Museum couldn't outdo Cai's neon-billowing flying cars, cascading wolf wave and log ride-reappropriating water circuit.
Best New Museum
Being the only new museum, The New Museum must be the best new museum in addition to actually being a great new museum (follow?). Its sleek stack of shimmering silver boxes on The Bowery is a great destination for time-strapped art fans, a well-curated best of from the global gallery scene – and with its free Thursday nights still not too crowded it's affordable too.
Best Gallery ShowSurvey shows can be spotty, often a gallery-owner's excuse to gloat over her or his accumulated art wealth. Not so with this spring's Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns? at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, a postmodernist quilting from dealer Gavin Brown and artist Urs Fisher. Overlapping artworks and painted-over murals mashed Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat up with Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons and Robert Morris. Beyond the envelope-pushing presentation, the jarring arrangements actually made for insightful comparisons.
Best New Building
Even though the now dissipated building frenzy gave us lots of all-glass uglies, there were also some great additions to our built environment. The most remarkable structure that will definitely be completed – currently growing its mesh skin on Cooper Square – is Thom Mayne's Cooper Union building, a spectacular cascading collage of metal layers and impossibly contorted interior atriums.
Best New All-Glass Ugly
When putting together one of those vertical suburbs for multi-millionaire compulsive narcissists, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel goes balls to the glass wall. After his subdued Soho condos, the Nouvel Chelsea (opening later this year at 19th St and Eleventh Ave) will feature an all-glass facade with over 1,600 individual panels. It probably won't actually be ugly, just a little gross.
This feature will appear in The L Magazine's upcoming Best of New York 2008 issue.
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