Art & Exhibitions

Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum is pairing its namesake with a latter-day expressionist artist who named the Dutch painter as a principal inspiration. “Matthew Wong | Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort” will be the largest show yet of the beloved Chinese-Canadian artist’s work in Europe, according to the museum. Speaking to Artnet News at the time of Wong’s death, his friend, artist Jonas Wood, even called Wong (1984-2019) “the modern day Van Gogh.” 
“I see a sincerity, a conviction and total commitment in Wong’s work that you also see with Van Gogh,” said Joost van der Hoeven, curator of the exhibition and a researcher at the museum. “They are unparalleled in their ability to combine emotional depth with a highly accessible visual language.”
The two artist’s canvases are similarly soulful, vividly colored, and expressionistic; both made extensive use of impasto. Self-taught as a painter, Wong took up the medium after studying photography, and also named artists like Gustav Klimt and Henri Matisse as touchstones.
Besides the similarities in their work, the artists also share a tragic commonality: Van Gogh died at 37, Wong at 35. When it comes to the market, the artists diverge dramatically. Wong found success during his lifetime, with New York gallery Karma displaying his work; shortly after his death, New York Times critic Roberta Smith lauded him as “one of the most talented painters of his generation”; and his market rocketed to surreal heights shortly after his death, as Eileen Kinsella reported in October 2020, when a Wong painting that went on the block at Christie’s with a high estimate of $700,000 fetched some $4.47 million.
Van Gogh, meanwhile, sold only one known painting during his life, and even posthumous success came slowly. 
“When I saw Wong’s work for the first time, it gripped me instantly, and I saw in it a whole range of art historical references,” said Van der Hoeven. And yet it remains completely original and contemporary. I am fascinated by this tension between recognition and originality, and that is what inspired me to make this exhibition.”
If you can’t make it to Amsterdam (or if tickets sell out), there’s also a catalogue featuring contributions by Artnet contributor Kenny Schachter, Richard Shiff, Sofia Silva, and John Yau.
“Matthew Wong | Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort” will be on view at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, from March 1 to September 1, 2024. See more images from the exhibition below.
Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with a Reaper, 1889. Courtesy Van Gogh Museum.
Matthew Wong, See You on the Other Side, 2019, © 2023 Matthew Wong Foundation / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023.
Matthew Wong, Unknown Pleasures, 2019, Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2023 Matthew Wong Foundation / Pictoright Amsterdam, 2023. Digital image courtesy of MoMA
Matthew Wong, Coming of Age Landscape, 2018. Matthew Wong Foundation / © Matthew Wong Foundation c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023.
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A forthcoming exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is making the case that music is as much a sonic experience as it is a visual one. 
“Art of Noise” will gather a staggering 800 art and design objects that have enhanced and vivified the experience of music over the past century. They range from product to graphic design, and span ages, but all of them have enhanced our relationship to music. Or, as curator Joseph Becker told me over a video call: “The artifacts that accompany the music lend presence to the music itself.”
When it came to building the exhibition, Becker was spoilt for choice. Most of the works on view emerge from SFMOMA’s permanent collection, which include such highlights as record sleeves, ads, and flyers from the Bay Area’s psychedelic rock heyday. In particular, the museum holds the complete collection of rock posters printed by legendary promoters Bill Graham and Family Dog Productions during the 1960s and ’70s. All 460 of them are going on view as a set for the first time. 
Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures poster (1979), designed by Factory Records after Peter Saville. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of Jenny Emerson and Accessions Committee Fund; © Peter Saville; photo: Tenari Tuatagaloa
Also given an outing are works designed by the likes of Milton Glaser, best known for his 1966 poster of a fiery-haired Bob Dylan; Emmet McBain, who left his primary-colored imprint on jazz records; and Victor Moscoso, designer of the 1960s’ trippiest posters. 
The show’s focus on music’s aesthetics stretches to encompass product and industrial design as well, namely the technology that’s made music playback possible. The gadgets arrayed here will trace a century’s worth of design and engineering evolutions from early phonographs to boomboxes and stereos to iPods. Sculptures by artists Ron Arad and Tom Sachs also feature. These devices, said Becker, “have allowed us to have different relationships to music.” 
Ron Arad, Concrete Stereo (1983). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee fund purchase; © Ron Arad Associates.
The curator is especially jazzed about interactive installations dotted throughout “Art of Noise.” One work by Teenage Engineering, titled Choir, will feature wooden figurines programmed to “sing” in various music genres in different tonal ranges. Another work, by celebrated engineer Devon Turnbull, will take over a gallery with giant custom speakers that will play a selection of rarities and master recordings in devastatingly high fidelity. For those conditioned to the playback quality of AirPods, Turnbull’s immersive installation promises “an awakening experience,” Becker said. 
Yuri Suzuki’s commission, Arborhythm, offers a similar listening experience outdoors, where visitors can recline amid tree-like sculptures. “The natural and urban sounds are remixed into this wellness soundtrack,” Becker explained. “It gets a little bit like a sound bath, a sonic conditioner.”
Teenage Engineering, Choir (2022). © teenage engineering.
The show will be rounded off by SFMOMA’s latest acquisitions, including a 1965 Brionvega RR126 stereo system, designed by Achille and Piergiacomo Castiglioni, as well as the DJ deck custom-designed by Teenage Engineering for Virgil Abloh’s set at Coachella in 2019. 
“This has been such a wonderful project to work on,” Becker reflected. “There are so many different access points to music because it’s so deeply ingrained in cross-cultural experiences. I think music just touches people in a way that is similar to art, but also in a way that is more universal.” 
See more images from the exhibition below.
Jason Munn, School of Seven Bells / Black Moth Super Rainbow (2010). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jason Munn, © Jason Munn; photo: Don Ross.
Achille and Piergiacomo Castiglioni, RR126 Stereo System, manufactured by Brionvega (1965). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; photo: Don Ross.
Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot, Braun SK-4 (1956). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot; photo: Katherine Du Tiel.
Lee Conklin, Canned Heat and Gordon Lightfoot at the Fillmore West, October 3–5, 1968 (1968). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jim Chanin; © Wolfgang’s Vault; photo: Don Ross.
Bonnie MacLean, The Yardbirds and The Doors at the Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, July 25–30, 1967 (1967). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jim Chanin; © Wolfgang’s Vault; photo: Don Ross
Teenage Engineering, Virgil Abloh DJ deck (2019). © teenage engineering; photo: Pelle Bergström, Skarp Agent.
Tom Sachs, Model Thirty-Six (2014). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of the FOG Forum; © Tom Sachs.
David Singer, Grateful Dead and Taj Mahal at the Fillmore West, February 5–8, 1970 (1970). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jim Chanin; © Wolfgang’s Vault; photo: Don Ross.
Mathieu Lehanneur, Power of Love (2009). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee fund purchase; © Mathieu Lehanneur; photo: Don Ross.
“Art of Noise” is on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St, San Francisco, May 4 through August 18. 
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Campina de Cima, the rock salt mine underneath the city of Loulé in Portugal, provides salt mostly for animal feed and de-icing the roads. However, for the last five years it has also been the only salt mine in the country to open to the public for guided tours of its 25 miles of tunnels.
It has recently taken on a new role as an exhibition space, which was inaugurated on February 17 with  ‘Ocean: Sea is Life’, an exhibition by artists from the Portuguese David Melgueiro Association which campaigns for ocean clean-ups. Its website states that the association’s purpose is “to provide operational and logistical support for scientific and technical activities, aimed at preserving the marine environment”.
The mine’s salt galleries lie around 754 feet beneath the city of Loulé and almost 100 feet below sea level, making them Portugal’s deepest tourist site. The salt itself is approximately 230-million-years-old.
Mining activities continue alongside guided tours, which explore the machinery used and the life of Saint Barbara. Legend says that martyr lived in the 4th century and was hidden from sight by her pagan father due to her great beauty. He eventually beheaded her when she converted to Christianity.
Barbara is the patron saint of miners, as well as those in other dangerous careers such as artillerymen and military engineers. There is a tradition in the tunnelling industry of setting up a shrine to the saint underground, to bring protection upon the workers. “Saint Barbara, Patron Saint of Miners and Other Arts” is a permanent exhibition at the Campina de Cima, which also boasts one of the world’s largest collections of object relating to the saint.
Saint Barbara statuette in Campina de Cima mine. Image via My Guide Algarve.
The saint was also the subject of the first-ever art exhibition to be held at the mine, back in 2022. It featured the works of German painter Klaus Zylla, who began focusing on her story during an artist residency in the Algarve.
These various artistic initiatives were put in place by the management company TechSalt SA with the hopes that the mine could become jewel in the crown of the Algarvensis Geopark, which has aspirations to become a UNESCO site. Their website lists TechSalt SA’s mission “to explore and commercialize the rock salt mineral resource at the Campina de Cima mine,” adding that they “want to reuse the mining space in an innovative way, contributing to the dissemination and promotion of Earth Scheinces, Mining Industry, and Art.”

‘Ocean: Sea is Life” closes at the end of April, and tickets to visit the mine are available through TechSalt’s website.
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Endless rooms of 19th-century portraits might not sound like an immediately exciting prospect, even if they were the socialites, celebrities, and statesmen of their day. As soon as the name John Singer Sargent is mentioned, however, the exhibition is sure to be a blockbuster hit. The American painter’s widespread appeal has hardly been diminished since the days when the most fashionable members of society’s upper crust were vying to be immortalized by his brush.
Like an antidote to the avant-garde, Sargent’s paintings have a timeless charm owed to his uncanny ability to bring subjects to life on canvas. The latest survey of his work, “Sargent and Fashion,” has just opened at Tate Britain in London after a successful run at the MFA Boston. Walking through the galleries, one feels almost like they are stepping into a century-old conversation between fully sentient figures.
Faces full of character aside, Sargent’s subjects stand out for his richly resplendent renderings of their dress. Over the course of a lifetime, Sargent’s other interests inevitably shifted but his love of fashion and texture would remain a constant. Highlighting this pivotal part of his practice, the exhibition reunites the portraits with the original clothes worn or, in some cases, items of a similar type. Examples include the bright yellow dress donned by Spanish dancer La Carmencita and the magnificent black opera cloak worn by Lady Sassoon.
Installation view of “Sargent and Fashion” at Tate Britain showing La Carmencita (c. 1890). Photo: Larina Fernandes, © Tate.
“One thing that is striking to anyone that looks at his work is just how much he’s interested in the clothes,” said the show’s curator James Finch. “He’s evidently in love with the textures of clothing. The exhibition allows viewers to see what Sargent is doing in the process of painting: the details that he picks out, the things that he elides, and the process of transformation that is taking place.”
Though some critics have struggled to understand the crucial role that fashion plays in constructing identity, its significance was obvious to Sargent and many of his sitters. It is well known that he kept a repertoire of props for this purpose and made careful but often surprising adjustments to each sitter’s costume as he saw fit.
“We have enough evidence to give a clear sense that Sargent was very interventionist,” said Finch. “There was a class of patron who sought out this unexpected quality in the portrait and who left themselves open to working with an artist who would push back. If you knew exactly how you wanted to be depicted, you probably wouldn’t go to Sargent.”
“He wasn’t an artist that relied on preparatory drawings,” Finch added, “but really worked his ideas out on the canvas. He never really smoothed out those edges even when he was extremely in demand. Every portrait was still an experiment on some level.”
Artnet News asked Finch to pick out five portraits from the exhibition that exemplify Sargent’s meticulous fashioning of identity through dress.

Lady Helen Vincent
John Singer Sargent, Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess d’Abernon (1904). Photo: Sean Pathasema, courtesy of Birmingham Museum of Art.
Sargent’s tendency to toy around with the details is apparent in his portrait of Lady Helen Vincent, a diarist and celebrated socialite who also worked as a nurse anaesthetist during World War I. Sargent painted her while she was staying in Venice just a few years before he would swear off portraits in 1907. Though Lady Helen was in fact wearing a white dress during their sessions, Sargent decided to change the color to black halfway through to produce a more immediately striking effect. Reflecting on this last minute swap, Sargent quipped that he was both a “painter and a dressmaker.”
“He would tailor what the sitter was wearing and make it look quite different,” said Finch. “Rather than simply documenting the latest styles he found a way to make them conform to his vision.”

Ellen Terry
Installation view of “Sargent and Fashion” at Tate Britain showing Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (c. 1889). Photo: Larina Fernandes, © Tate.
When Sargent attended the opening night of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre in London in 1888, he was immediately moved to paint the actress Ellen Terry in the starring role of Lady Macbeth. She stood out on stage for her spectacular dress that was adorned with gold thread and 1,000 iridescent wings plucked from the green jewel beetle. When Terry described the dress to her daughter, she lamented that “the photographs give no idea of it at all, for it is in color that is so splendid.”
Luckily, Sargent wasted no time in asking to paint Terry. He had originally picked a pose that directly quoted the play but ended up having the star raise her arms over her head instead.
“The pose is devised to showcase the dress so that you really get a sense of how the sleeves and cloak fall in a very dramatic way,” said Finch. “Its a really extravagant outfit that shows the outsized personality of the performer.”
Surprisingly, Sargent also chose to make the dress more blue than it appears in real life on the advice of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.

Samuel Jean Pozzi
John Singer Sargent, Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881). Photo: The Armand Hammer Collection.
The French surgeon Samuel Jean Pozzi was a glamorous man about town who befriended notable cultural figures like Marcel Proust and Sarah Bernhardt, and had numerous affairs, including with Virginie Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most notorious Portrait of Madame X (1884).
Pozzi’s more dapper side comes across in a black-and-white photo from the time, but Sargent made the bold choice to reimagine him in a totally different guise. Striking an elegant pose, Pozzi is shown wearing a statement red dressing gown and Turkish slippers in a disarmingly intimate domestic space.
“Its an almost transgressive way of depicting him that says so much about subverting ideas of masculinity at that time,” said Finch.

Lady Hammersley
John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (1892). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Douglass Campbell, in memory of Mrs. Richard E. Danielson, 1998.
The London hostess Mrs. Hammersley stands out against a decadent gold background for her cherry pink velvet gown. We know just how faithfully Sargent reproduced the color thanks to the swatch that Hammersley kept, which has since entered the the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection along with the painting.
“She clearly had such a strong sense of what it meant to sit for Sargent,” said Finch. “She was very interested in the arts and had a salon that was attended by Sargent, Walter Sickert, Augustus John, and other artists. She kept all her correspondence with Sargent and clearly had a sense of herself as her own archivist.”
The painting caused a stir when it was exhibited in 1893, with critics expressing discomfort at its ostentatious emphasis on dress. George Moore described the work as “the apotheosis of fashionable painting,” that would have as short a lifespan as any other trend. One day, he concluded, “many will turn with a shudder from its cold, material accomplishment.” Needless to say, it remains a widely admired portrait.

Eleanor O’Donnell Iselin
John Singer Sargent, Eleanora O’Donnell Iselin (Mrs. Adrian Iselin) (1888). Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington.
When Eleanor O’Donnell Iselin first sat for Sargent, she must have known that he preferred an interventionist approach because she brought an array of exquisite dresses from Paris for him to choose from. Ever unpredictable, Sargent was immediately taken instead by the simple black day dress she had arrived in. According to at least one account, Iselin was disappointed by the artist’s choice, but we can only assume that he saw in the more austere outfit a fitting tribute to Iselin’s reportedly serious character.
“Its perhaps not what Iselin would have had in mind when she was first commissioning Sargent,” said Finch, but as always, “it would be a process of negotiation to reach the final outcome.”
“Sargent and Fashion” is on view at Tate Britain in London until July 7, 2024. 
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The latest display at Liverpool’s Beatles Museum is the unlikely result of a 55-year-long saga involving John Lennon and Yoko Ono, an aborted peace monument, a drunk driver, and a retired traffic cop who does not care for the Beatles.
The musical duo planted the acorns at Coventry Cathedral in 1968, intending for them to be part of a living sculpture, with a wrought iron bench surrounding the two trees. But in less than a week’s time, the acorns had been dug up and stolen, and a discouraged Lennon gave up on the gesture and removed the bench. 
It turns out that a few days after the theft, a young man was busted for drunk driving nearby, and Mike Davies, a traffic sergeant with the Warwickshire Police, retrieved the acorns from him. The offender and his girlfriend, who were in fact Beatles fans, had dug up the acorns and coated them in clear nail varnish in order to preserve them. 
“They walked and the acorns were left,” Davies, now 88, told the PA news agency, explaining that the acorns were, legally speaking, worthless and had no owner, so he didn’t bring charges. “It was no good taking them back and replanting them because they were covered in nail varnish so wouldn’t grow.”
Davies simply kept the acorns in his desk until his retirement in 1980, at which time he brought them home in a cardboard box with other personal effects. He had forgotten all about them until he came across them last year.
“They were two seconds off going in the waste bin when I thought, ‘That was John Lennon and Yoko Ono,’” he said.
So, Davies sent them to the Liverpool museum, saying that if they weren’t interested in adding them to the collection, they should just throw them out, as he didn’t care to have them back. 
The two acorns that John Lennon and Yoko Ono planted at Coventry Cathederal and were then dug up and stolen, now on display at the Beatles Museum in Matthew Street, Liverpool. Photo by Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images.
The acorns have now gone on display at the museum after an unveiling by Lennon’s sister, Julia Baird. 
“John Lennon and Yoko Ono kicked off their whole peace movement with this art installation, where the acorns were planted,” said Roag Best, museum owner and brother to original Beatles drummer Pete Best. 
Lennon and Ono’s quest for world peace, which came at the peak of the counterculture movement, was well known, including “bed-ins,” one from their suite at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel and another from the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, and their slogan “War is over! If you want it.” At the Montreal bed-in, they wrote the song “Give Peace a Chance,” which as recorded as a Plastic Ono Band single in 1969 and became an international hit.
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The Colossus of Constantine has returned to Rome, recreated from existing fragments with the help of latest 3D scanning and modeling technologies. Produced by the Madrid-based digital preservation nonprofit Factum Foundation, the statue was first exhibited at Fondazione Prada’s 2022 exhibition “Recycling Beauty.” Early this month, the 42-feet-tall, 1:1 facsimile of the Colossus arrived in Rome, and will remain in the garden of Villa Caffarelli of Musei Capitolini at least until 2025.
It is believed that the original Colossus, commissioned by the emperor Constantine and produced between 313 and 315 C.E. was itself a “remake,” adapting a pre-existing pagan statue. Placed in the Basilica of Maxentius, it commemorated the rule of emperor Constantine, marking his and the Roman Empire’s conversion from paganism to Christianity. This was also where the marble fragments used in the recreation of the Colossus were discovered in the 15th century, now on view at the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome. Missing parts of the monumental seated figure are thought to have been pillaged for bronze sometime in the late Antiquity.
The surviving portions of the statue of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great on view in a courtyard of the Capitoline Museums. Photo: Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
Fragments from Rome and one chest fragment from the Parco Archeologico del Colosseo were scanned using photogrammetry and a LiDAR scanner, technologies increasingly popular in heritage preservation and conservation. Missing parts of the statue were modeled by 3D sculptor Irene Gaumé in consultation with experts and curators at the Musei Capitolini and with reference to coeval statues from Ara Pacis Museum, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and the Museo Nazionale Romano.
In place of the original white marble and bronze clad onto a brick and wood structure, the facsimile features contemporary materials and techniques. 3D printing, reinforced resin, polyurethane, marble dust, aluminum, gold leaf, and plaster were combined to produce a durable facsimile that closely imitates original materials, Factum Foundation reported in an extensive write-up.
Detail of replica of the statue Roman Emperor Constantine that was rebuilt using 3D technology. Photo: Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
Digitally reconstructed parts of the statue were visually distinguished from facsimiles made from scanned fragments. “We’re not trying to build a fake object,” the founder of Factum Foundation Adam Lowe told the New York Times. “We’re trying to build something that physically and emotionally engages and that intellectually stimulates you.”
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Upcoming at the Louvre in Paris, a major exhibition is set to showcase the works of Jan van Eyck (1390-1441), the Flemish master of the Northern Renaissance, from March 20 to June 17, 2024. Titled “Meeting with a Masterpiece: The Virgin by Chancellor Rolin” the exhibition promises to present the largest collection of Van Eyck’s works ever seen in France.
The artist’s influence on European art cannot be overstated. His mastery of oil painting techniques changed the course of western art history, bringing a newfound realism and luminosity to his works. Through his method of glazing, which involved applying multiple translucent layers of oil paint, Van Eyck achieved depth, richness of colour, and intricate light and shadow effects. His meticulous attention to detail breathed life into his compositions, from the textures of fabrics to the landscapes in the background.
Van Eyck received commissions to paint significant portraits, including Isabella of Portugal. One of his most famed works, The Arnolfini Portrait, painted in 1434, depicts Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife in their home. The work has various interpretations and mysteries, including a cryptic figure within the convex mirror’s reflection.
Jan Van Eyck, The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (ca. 1435) before restoration. Musée du Louvre, dist RMT – Grand Palais, Angèle Dequier.
At the heart of the exhibition in Paris lies the restored version of The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin, completed around 1435. After undergoing historic restoration, the painting had centuries-old oxidised varnish removed to reveal the painted layers that lie beneath. Alongside this piece, the exhibition will feature six other masterpieces by Van Eyck, including The Lucca Madonna (ca. 1437) from the Städel Museum. This rare exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to explore Van Eyck’s evolution as an artist and his interactions with contemporaries like Rogier van der Weyden and Robert Campin.
A program of events will accompany the exhibition, with a series of lectures on the restoration process, musical performances inspired by Van Eyck’s works, and opportunities to engage with art experts. If Alastair Sooke’s review of the “Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution” exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent in 2020 is anything to go by, we are eagerly anticipating the upcoming show in Paris.
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It is reasonable to expect that we may not remember the noughties with absolute clarity. We stumbled towards that historical horizon with a fin-de-siècle perversity made all the more dire by the rising superstitions of millennial dread. And then, with an offbeat chronological clockwork that belied the frenzy of Y2K, we hit the new century with a traumatic bang 20 months later, on September 11, 2001. 
It all comes back to us when we listen to decade-defining greatest hits compilations heavy on Eminen, Coldplay, Pink, Linkin Park, Black Eyed Peas, and Britney Spears. Lets not forget the memes that remind us of the advent of social media. Isn’t the very nature of cultural memory defined by the fact that first-hand experience is never so comprehensible as when it is relived through nostalgia? When I was growing up, the joke was that if you could remember the sixties you weren’t there, but this seems to be a rule of thumb for every era. Actually living it is incidental and anecdotal to the fictions of recollection.
The promise of a new century is something between an extreme diet and a healthy amnesia. We can finally shed all those named decades and the burden of their associations to start anew with a clean slate. The expectation should be that it is shiny, young, and fresh, rather than dusty, old, and dull. We want novelty and, above all else, youth, so that’s what we’re celebrating here, the exhibitions from 2000 to 2010, which put youth culture and its unruly vernaculars above mid-career surveys and historical retrospectives.
Also, please note that to avoid the gratuitous hierarchy of listicles, this is an index of certain shows as they occurred chronologically rather than by degree of importance.
“Sensation” at the Brooklyn Museum, NY (2000) 
Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum of Art look at artist Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, part of the “Sensation” exhibition (1999). Photo: Doug Kanter/AFP via Getty Images
The best way to dive into the arbitrary framework of divvying up history according to the numbers of a Gregorian calendar is to cheat, so we’re starting with a show that was really a late ’90s exhibition in London because, well, it did run in New York through January 2000.
Like a grand debutante ball for a generation of YBAs (Young British Artists), this was a coming out like few others, the zeitgeist as organized and packaged by an English ad man. Of course it mattered that so many of its artists (including the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Rachel Whiteread) were brilliant, but it sure helped that they were as ambitious and crafty as the exhibition’s capitalist maestro, Charles Saatchi.
Somehow pulling off all the experimental, radical, and subversive genius of late 20th-century American art with impeccable English style, it felt like Brian Epstein and Malcolm McLaren had gotten together to launch another British Invasion, something we might have resented if it hadn’t been so damn smart and sexy.
Scandal and outrage—with a healthy dash of culture wars rhetoric—were a big part of the heady brew, as England got all Fleet Street over Marcus Harvey’s monumental portrait of serial killer Myra Hindley, and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani got his knickers in knots over Chris Ofili’s use of elephant dung in his representation of the Virgin Mary. He decried that “the city shouldn’t have to pay for this sick stuff,” before trying to pull the Brooklyn Museum’s funding and evict them from their century-old home. Funny how the media now frames Giuliani’s despicable behavior, pathological lies, and psychotic furies like some amazing fall from grace. Most New Yorkers have known he’s a deranged asshole for a long time.

“Beautiful Losers” at Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (2004) 
Installation view, “Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art, Skateboarding and Street Culture” at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Photo: Tony Walsh (2004). Image courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH.
The first and still unmatched exhibition to chart the visual artists deeply associated with the subcultures of skateboarding, graffiti, punk, and hip hop, “Beautiful Losers” succeeded like none before, because it understood these are not opposing camps but realms of mutual influence and dynamic cross-pollination.
Taking its name from a 1966 novel by Leonard Cohen, and grounded with a pantheon of forbearers including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Clark, Robert Crumb, Futura, Keith Haring, Raymond Pettibon, Pushead, C.R. Stecyk III, and Andy Warhol, “Beautiful Losers” helped launch and conceptualize a generation of artists who had fans long before they had collectors. Among them were Mark Gonzales, Kaws, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Ryan McGinley, and so many others that are now simply legendary.
Born of alternate media sensibilities like zines, album covers, skateboard graphics, sketchbooks, and music videos, the cumulative effect was D.I.Y. multimedia, a tribal narrative of underground sensibilities so compelling one of the curators, Aaron Rose, made the show into a movie, and four of the artists—Harmony Korine, Mike Mills, Cheryl Dunn and Spike Jonze—would become far more celebrated as filmmakers.

“Ecstasy: In and About Altered States” at MOCA, Los Angeles (2005) 
Installation view of Ecstasy: In and About Altered States, October 9, 2005 – February 20, 2006 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photo by Brian Forrest.
When it comes to understanding culture, there is the question of how much contemporary creativity is about the fine art of intoxication. Does art look the way it does, or music sound a particular way, because artists get high? And do we seek out these expressions because we like feeling that way too?
A sensory gift from curator Paul Schimmel back when he had his MOCA mojo, “Ecstasy” was a universe of out of this world. This was eye-candy with selfie-magnets for communal ego deaths, like Carsten Holler’s “Upside Down Mushroom Room”, and a cast of blue chip art stars tripping the light fantastic. It was like the coolest chill out room in the most aesthetic rave, a full blast of mind-melting mayhem at a visionary velocity that would make Bernini dance in his grave. 

“Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture” at Japan Society, NYC (2005) 
Installation shot, “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture”. Yuji Sakai, godzilla figures, various scales and dates.Photo: Sheldan Collins. Courtesy the Japan Society.
The brilliant finale to Takeshi Murakami’s trilogy of shows on Japanese popular culture that began with “Superflat” in 2000, “Little Boy”—named after the type of atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima—explored the gleeful infantilism of post-war Japanese art from the dark perspective of national trauma. Dizzying, delirious, and entertaining in ways that most fine art would never dare to be, “Little Boy” spun an alternative storyline, as conceptually acute as it was visually compelling. It spanned the legacy of Manga comics and Anime cartoons, the fetish of Godzilla toy figures, the rise of Otaku fan culture, the post-modern perversity of Kawaii’s super-cute, and the explosion of a hyperactive pop culture, as the frantic expressions of the psychic rupture wrought by the atomic age.
A stunning example of just how wildly inventive language gets when lost in translation, Japan’s embrace of western entertainment’s spectacle would indeed forever change our own amusements and obsessions. By looking back Murakami was prescient beyond measure, delivering an art house prequel to Barbenheimer with subversive subtitles.  

“Spank the Monkey” at the Baltic Art Centre, Gateshead, UK (2006) 
Installation view of work by Barry Mcgee in “Spank the Monkey” exhibition at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, (2006-7). Photo Colin Davison © the artist. Courtesy Baltic.
Probably the most important show no one has heard of, “Spank the Monkey” saw curator Pedro Alonzo catch the big wave of urban art long before it crested into an international phenomenon. He brought a wide range of practices into an unlikely but lively dialog, including those of Banksy, Dr Lakra, FAILE, Shepard Fairey, Invader, Barry McGee, Ryan McGinness, Os Gemeos, David Shrigley, Swoon and Ed Templeton. Sadly the museum—mistaking youth culture with juvenile humor—chose to name the show after the act of masturbation, so instead of heading these artists’ bios, it was dropped by all to spare cringe embarrassment.  

“The Generational Triennial: Younger than Jesus” at the New Museum, NYC (2009) 
Installation view of “The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus,” New Museum, New York (2009). Photo: Allison Brady
Billed as “The Generational” triennial, “Younger than Jesus” seemed so bold out the gate, limiting itself to artists under 33 years old, and making too evident how the art world’s vampire thirst for new blood lays in some shady ground between Peter Pan and pedophilia.
With a trio of sharp curators, Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman, which was somehow abetted by an open source network of 150 arts professionals the world over, this gathering of Gen Y Millennials (the kids of Baby Boomers, for those keeping track) was about as tepid as one might expect of consensus opinion, showcasing the process of collective ratification and ambitious professionalism more than the slippery moves of delinquent kids who ultimately do more to change the world than their disappointed parents will ever know.
Though the energy flagged as it inevitably does when adult squares try to dress up like cool kids, the endeavor was too savvy to fail, with some killer work by Cory Arcangel, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Josh Smith, Ryan Trecartin, and Adam Pendleton, back when they were fresh.

Wynwood Walls in Miami (2009) 
Wynwood Walls with Peter Tunney at Wynwood Walls on December 10, 2017 in Miami, featuring mural by Kenny Scharf. Photo: Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
For all the elite, rich power players in the art world, really visionary patrons like Tony Goldman don’t come along all that often. Starting out in the 1960s with his brother, renovating apartments on the Upper West Side, Tony fell in love with a neglected no-man’s land downtown called Soho, working as much as an historian preserving the flat-iron architecture as a developer, and learning that neighborhoods ultimately depend on culture and community far more than the wealthy cats who take them over.
He did the same for the art deco district of Miami Beach, and for his final act brought us to the nightmarish gentrification party zone we now know as the Wynwood district. For all his kindness in life, capitalist success will always leave a mixed legacy, and the once generous and freewheeling outdoor museum Goldman created is now a tourist clip joint with all the curatorial adventure of a marketing company, seeing which artists have the most likes on social media. But if you were lucky enough to be there when Tony opened it at the end of the decade with major murals by Futura, Os Gemeos, Kenny Scharf, Barry McGee, and Shepard Fairey, you will never forget the magic that can happen when the city dreams for all to see. 

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