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2 "Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape" (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York) In a profound way, this small show, curated by Gail S. Davidson and Floramae McCarron-Cates, revealed the endless, incestuous relationship of the American subject to the untamable landscape--making it clear that the distance between these painters' vision of nature and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth can be measured in light-years. It is not obvious just how we morphed from explorers into tourists, from desiring awe to requiring comfort. But, way ahead of Greenpeace and ecoterrorism, these painters made the case for nature--never knowing that their paintings would lead to maddening exploitation, as people took inspiration from their work to transform nature into the most successful marketing tool of the tourism industry, with unavoidable polluting effects.

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3 Thomas Hirschhorn, "Superficial Engagement" (Gladstone Gallery, New York) The best CliffsNotes to America's macabre folly in Iraq. Maybe art can't change the world, but Hirschhorn's "Superficial Engagement" was proof that the world can change art. This brutal installation and gruesome tour de force--a rollicking heads-and-guts bouillabaisse--was a melancholy reflection on the power of art to understand and convey pain. Anybody looking for death as an existential concept here would have been disappointed: The images of suicide bombers and their victims make dying today seem a very superficial endeavor.

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4 Oriana Fallaci A brilliant writer and interviewer of everyone from Federico Fellini to Henry Kissinger, Fallaci died in September without having accomplished her aim of becoming a Mediterranean Susan Sontag. Her final tantrums about fundamentalist Islam were both spectacular and sad. (Her best-selling 2002 book, The Rage and the Pride [Rizzoli], would have been better titled Rage and Prejudice.) Fallaci devoured her last meal of notoriety with a compulsive appetite, harboring a barely veiled resentment at being excluded from history, the very subject she had previously interrogated so aggressively. Still, her Garboesque attitude and her courage (which sometimes verged on foolhardiness) made her one of the icons of the twentieth century.

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5 Etta Etrog's studio near Bucharest, Romania When an interviewer once asked Leo Castelli how he could be sure there was not a great artist he was not aware of, hidden somewhere in the world, Castelli declared, "If such an artist is out there, we"--meaning the art world--"would know." Perhaps, but I encountered Etrog's work this year only by serendipity, when I opened a suspicious e-mail that contained a few JPEGS of her recent paintings--the most remarkable representations of modern blandness. Each one featured a wall, a floor, one or two electrical outlets, and an electrical cable, plugged or unplugged, running out of the frame. Francois Jullien, a French expert on Chinese culture, has written, "The bland brings us to experience a world beyond." Looking at Etrog's canvases a few months later in her chilly studio, I experienced a world beyond the bad remake of the '80s (with ten times the budget) that is art today. I experienced a certain pathetic, beautiful naivete that has elsewhere gone missing in action.