Best of 2003: what were the brightest lights during the past year in art? We asked eleven of our regular contributors to take a look back

(9) Leon Ballista Alberti, Momus (Harvard University Press) Best known for his treatise on perspective, Alberti also penned this highly amusing satirical account of Momus, the "god of fault-finding and the personification of embittered mockery," as editors Sarah Knight and Virginia Brown put it--i.e., the god of criticism. Everybody knows that critics are EVIL (think only of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, Waldo Lydecker in Laura, or Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead).

(10) Overheard at World of Video Two clerks talking about Larry Clark's "punk Picasso" exhibition at Luhring Augustine: "Goin' to see the show tomorrow, supposed to be awesome. West Twenty-fourth Street. All huge galleries with big glass doors. Dude, they've got it all laid out for you."

Artforum contributing editor David Rimanelli teaches art history at New York University. He is the curator of "Women Beware Women," on view at Deitch Projects, New York, through December 20. Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

1. Felix Gmelin, Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II (Color Test, The Red Flag II), 2002. Installation view, 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. 2. Spencer Finch, Eos (dawn, Troy), 2002. Installation view, Postmasters, New York, 2002. Edward Krasinski, Untitled, 2001/2003. Installation view, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 2003. 3. Richard Prince, Graduate Nurse, 2002, ink-jet print and acrylic on canvas, 89 x 52". 4. Ellsworth Kelly, Green Blue Red, 1964, oil on canvas, 73 x 100". 5. Christian Schad, Marcella (Marcella Schad), 1926, oil on wood, 31 1/2 x 22 1/2", 6. Danny Boyle, 28 Days Later, 2002, still from a color DV film, 113 minutes. Foreground: Private Clifton (Luke Mably). Background: Private Mailer (Marvin Campbell). 7. Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (GingerAss), 2002, color photograph. 8. Advertisement for Zoloft, 2003. 9. Leon Battista Albetti, Momus, 1443-50 (Harvard University Press, 2003). 10. Larry Clark, Untitled (Threesome), 1980, black-and-white photograph, 19 1/2 x 13". From the series "42nd Street."

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Kate Bush

(1) "The Air Is Blue" (Casa Luis Barragan, Mexico City) Compared with the clutter and chaos of "Utopia Station" at the Venice Biennale, this Hans-Ulrich Obrist curatorial vehicle at architect Luis Barragan's exquisite home in Mexico City was the epitome of restraint. Twenty-seven artists, local and foreign, were invited to respond to the man and his manse. Their interventions in the house were often as intangible as Barragan's own subtle fusions of light, form, and color. Rirkfit Tiravanija got his green Cadillac running, and Cerith Wyn Evans played his record collection on old phonographs. But Lygia Pape's ethereal web of golden threads strung across the light-flooded studio and Anri Sala's photograph of a white horse impaled on a shiny steel column best apotheosized Barragan's visionary conjunctions of nature and modernism.

(2) "Cruel and Tender" (Tate Modern, London) Tate's first-ever photography exhibition, curated by Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski, was authoritative, comprehensive, and exhaustively researched, h traced the tradition of rigorously observed, artistically ungarnished photography, bequeathed from August Sander to Walker Evans, onto Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank in the '50s, and resting, in the present day, with Rineke Dijkstra and Paul Graham. The exhibition was particularly lucid in describing the relationship between the Dusseldorf triumvirate (Gursky, Struth, Ruff) and the US landscapists who preceded them (Shore, Robert Adams, Baltz). Great documentary photography doesn't just illustrate the world indexically but articulates meaning in it, and this exhibition provided an object lesson for the myriad young photographers and video makers currently appropriating the raw aesthetics rather than the philosophical or political substance of the documentary mode.