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Best Of Arts 2011 The Style critics were driven half-mad by this year’s Best Of selections. The movie and theater offerings were so good 10 picks weren’t enough, they fretted. Visual arts were scattered, and TV faves are so, well, personal. Nevertheless, they did it.
10. The Office (NBC).
Nobody has said much about this, but, um — Steve who? The cast and writers have quietly rallied, filling the Dunder Mifflin power vacuum with Ed Helms and James Spader. An episode a couple weeks ago, in which Helms’s Andrew Bernard struggled to placate Spader’s Robert California by not-not giving California’s wife (Maura Tierney) a job, proves that the awkward quality that made “The Office” work before is still very much intact.
Chris Haston
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NBC
9. Modern Family (ABC).
Felt a little wobbly there after the season-opening dude-ranch vacation trip but still the most satisfying half-hour of my week — and probably yours, too.
Richard Foreman
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ABC
8. Game of Thrones (HBO).
I settled down and came around to this adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s best-selling fantasy series, but it wasn’t (and still isn’t) easy. I’ll never have time to plod through all those books — does winter ever come to Westeros? Returns in April 2012.
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HBO
7. American Horror Story (FX).
Ryan Murphy’s haunted house romp became just as hokey as I predicted it would, but stylistically, the show is still buzzworthy. There’s something in every episode that’s a great hoot, if not a holler. Season finale Dec. 21.
Robert Zuckerman
6. The Walking Dead (AMC).
Gets my “most improved” award for a gripping second season as the survivors sought temporary refuge from the zombies at a mysterious farm. Resumes Feb. 12.
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AP
5. Breaking Bad (AMC).
Sent me over the edge of anxiety this season. “Breaking Bad” just keeps outdoing itself, this time thanks to the unforgettable Giancarlo Esposito as Gustavo “Gus” Fring. Returns in 2012.
Ursula Coyote
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AMC
4. Storage Wars (A&E).
I never tire of seeing what’s in those abandoned storage units, though the cooked up auction drama is easily overblown — to say nothing of the utter disregard for the misfortunes that resulted in the auctions to begin with. Is it recession escapism or recession denial?
Emily Shur
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A&E Network
3. Homeland (Showtime).
Addictively perfect anti-terrorism thriller, set in our own spooky NoVa, held together by a stunningly edgy performance from Claire Danes as a borderline psychotic CIA agent. Season finale Dec. 18.
Kent Smith/SHOWTIME
2. Enlightened (HBO)
A difficult case to make, but I stand by it. Sometimes the “best” TV show is not necessarily the most entertaining. The concluding two episodes of Mike White and Laura Dern’s psychological character study have made this show a worthwhile gem — and a hauntingly lovely comment on our modern conflict between our higher, yoga-toned selves and corporate cubicle culture. Season finale airs Monday.
PRASHANT GUPTA
1. Downton Abbey (PBS)
Who would have thought that in a year so ripe with class animosity from the 99 percent that our favorite show would be a purely British crunchy-gravel saga of an aristocratic family (and their servants) living in a countryside estate circa 1912. Second season begins Jan. 8.
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MASTERPIECE
THE WORST
People also ask me what the worst thing on TV is. I’ve run out of ways to say “Zooey Deschanel” and “New Girl” without feeling like I’m going to throw up. Even the people who actually like her or her show don’t really put up much of a fight.
Greg Gayne
10. Fauna, “Manshines”
As electronic dance music hyperventilated its way across the United States, this Argentinian duo kept things slow and low, continuing their reinvention of cumbia by adding a splash of psychotropic futurism.
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Courtesy of ZZK Records
9. James Blake, “James Blake”
Inventive and emotive, this young Londoner’s avant love songs sound like they were pressed from an undiscovered corner of the human heart.
ALAIN JOCARD
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AFP/Getty Images
8. Real Estate, “Days”
These Jersey boys pen casually gorgeous rock tunes about suburbia that actually resemble suburbia — they’re very clean, sort of sad and way too easy to get lost in.
Shawn Brackbill
7. Bon Iver, “Bon Iver”
There’s hard rock, there’s soft rock, and now there’s this. Listen closely to Wisconsinite Justin Vernon’s vaporous ballads and you’ll hear rock-and-roll sublimating like a block of dry ice.
Courtesy of Jagjaguwar
6. Bluebrain, “The National Mall”
The Washington duo’s first “location aware album” was the year’s most innovative pop release — a smartphone app that used Global Positioning System technology to trigger changes in the band’s music depending on where you strolled on the Mall. It was like using GPS to navigate a dream.
Ben Chetta
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Bluebrain
5. Drake, “Take Care”
He’s not really a rapper. Or a singer. Drake simply spills his guts at the blurry intersection where words meet melody. On his stunningly self-aware sophomore effort, he speak-sing-raps, “I think I like who I’m becoming.” Everyone should.
Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Songwriters Hall of Fame
4. Katy B, “On a Mission”
So you think you can dance (and would prefer to do it while listening to a British singer narrate youth in 21st-century clubland with an honesty that you wish American pop stars would emulate)? This one’s for you.
Courtesy of Columbia Records
3. Pistol Annies, “Hell on Heels”
On their debut album, Miranda Lambert and her songwriting buddies go hunting for the contact point between humor and heartbreak. They find it with “Trailer for Rent,” a song about an unhappy home available on the first of the month. If it doesn’t put tears in your dimples, nothing will.
Ethan Miller
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Getty Images
2. Jay-Z and Kanye West, “Watch the Throne”
Instead of blushing over their embarrassment of riches, pop’s most intriguing partnership delivered a self-congratulatory opus that was adventurous enough to remind us that they’re rap visionaries first, 1 percent bazillionaires second.
Jamie McCarthy
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GETTY IMAGES
1. The Weeknd, “House of Balloons”
The last time R&B felt this darkly erotic, it was being made by a tiny purple sphinx from Minneapolis. Abel Tesfaye, the 21-year-old Toronto singer who records as the Weeknd, already seems every bit as enigmatic as Prince — and his dreamy-druggy-sexy-scary-superlative debut was nearly as seductive.
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XO
‘1Q84,’ by Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel (Knopf, $30.50). Murakami’s tightly plotted tour de force — in which a young woman is dropped into a parallel reality and a lonely would-be novelist’s life is underdone — is both an eerie thriller and a moving love story. — Michael Dirda
Knopf
‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing,’ by Anuradha Roy (Free Press; paperback, $14). In this sprawling epic set in 20th-century India, a single act of pity rattles down generations to break a caste’s rules, test a family’s mettle and throw together two unlikely childhood friends who will negotiate every circuit of human love. — Marie Arana
Marie Arana
‘State of Wonder,’ by Ann Patchett (Harper, $26.99). Patchett’s thoughtful, gripping novel about a scientist sent to the Amazon jungle to track down a missing colleague grapples equally well with the unsavory behavior of Western pharmaceutical firms and the strange choices individuals make in the remote wilderness of their own conscience. — RC
Harper
‘Doc,’ by Mary Doria Russell (Random House, $26). Russell’s novel about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp is a bold act of historical reclamation that scrapes off the bull and allows those American legends to walk and love and grieve in the dynamic 19th-century world that existed before Hollywood shellacked it with cliches. — Ron Charles
Ron Charles
‘Once Upon a River,’ by Bonnie Jo Campbell (Norton, $25.95). Campbell’s gritty but tender novel features an unforgettable heroine whose determination to carve out a life on her own in rural Michigan is challenged by nature and some very bad men. — RC
Norton
‘Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius,’ by Sylvia Nasar (Simon & Schuster, $35). From the author of “A Beautiful Mind,” a history of economic thought that focuses on the lives of the characters who helped shape it — from Charles Dickens to Marx, Engels and Milton Friedman. — Steven Pearlstein
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Simon & Schuster
‘Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961,’ by Paul Hendrickson (Knopf, $30). A large-minded, rigorously fair summation of the best thought on Hemingway’s writing, his life, traumas, pathologies, his family and friends, and his even more abundant cast of personal, literary and cultural enemies. — Howell Raines
Knopf
‘Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,’ by Ezra F. Vogel (Belknap/Harvard Univ., $39.95). Vogel’s masterful history of China’s reform era is perhaps the clearest account of the revolution that turned China from a totalitarian backwater into the power it has become today. — John Pomfret
Belknap Press
‘Steve Jobs,’ by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, $35). This biography of the iconic computer genius is a textbook study of the rise and fall and rise of Apple and the brutal clashes that destroyed friendships and careers. It is also a gadget lover’s dream, with fabulous inside accounts of how the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad came to be. — Michael S. Rosenwald
Albert Watson
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Simon & Schuster
‘The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War,’ by Peter Englund (Knopf, $35). This remarkable history captures World War I as seen through the eyes of 20 people who experienced it, including an English nurse in the Russian army, a Scots soldier in Africa, an American fighting with the Italians and a Venezuelan cowboy who joins the Ottoman army because of the French. These voices convey the war’s complexity better than any of the grand histories so far written. — Gerard DeGroot
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Knopf
10. “Win Win”
Tom McCarthy’s observantly funny film about a lawyer (Paul Giamatti, left, with Alex Shaffer) driven to comically dark lengths to support his family captured the economic anxieties of the year with compassion and warmth.
Kimberly Wright TM
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© 2010 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp
9. “Drive”
Nicolas Winding Refn’s quietly contained genre piece actually didn’t involve much driving, but it moved nonetheless, propelled by a transfixing lead performance by Ryan Gosling and Refn’s unimpeachable sense of style. Even when the film erupted into cartoonishly graphic violence, the wheels didn’t come off.
Richard Foreman Jr SMPSP
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AP
8. “The Trip”
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon hammed it up through the gastro-pubs and literary waysides of northern England in Michael Winterbottom’s hilarious picaresque about friendship, ego and the sensuous pleasures of a really great meal.
Courtesy IFC Films
7. “Nostalgia for the Light”
Patricio Guzman’s stirring documentary, set in Chile’s Atacama Desert, engaged the Big Questions that occupied so many filmmakers this year, including memory, history, cosmic truths and the meaning of life — with the most rigor, insight and poetic lyricism.
Photo Courtesy of Icarus Films
6. “Take Shelter”
This superbly crafted thriller featured a career-making performance from Michael Shannon as a man haunted by visions of a coming apocalypse that may or may not be real.
Photo by Grove Hill Productions, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
5. “Beginners”
Mike Mills’s autobiographically inspired comedy-drama about a grown son and his father was sweet without being sappy and used bold visual graphics to give the storytelling verve and punch.
Focus Features
4. “Buck”
One of the most riveting films of the year, this gorgeously filmed documentary revolved around Buck Brannaman, the real-life “horse whisperer” whose work with horses takes on transcendent, life-healing dimensions.
Ezra D. Olsen
3. “Moneyball”
Bennett Miller’s thoroughly satisfying adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book featured Brad Pitt as baseball manager Billy Beane in a funny, moving homage to utility players — both on the field and off.
Melinda Sue Gordon
2. “The Descendants”
Comedy, tragedy, satire and humanism danced a delicate gavotte in Alexander Payne’s affecting family drama, which starred a dressed-down George Clooney as a distant husband and father trying to reconnect with his family, both past and present.
Merie Wallace
1. “Meek’s Cutoff”
Kelly Reichardt’s mesmerizing story of 19th-century settlers traveling to Oregon radically redefined the Western, stripping it to its most raw elements and reinvigorating it with immersive realism.
OSCILLOSCOPE FILMS
Charles Dutoit and the Philadelphia Orchestra, May 20, Kennedy Center (Washington Performing Arts Society)
The fabulous Philadelphians declared bankruptcy in April, yet their performance of the Tchaikovsky Fifth was possibly the richest musical experience of the year.
Chris Lee
Daniil Trifonov with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, Oct. 8, George Mason University
The winner of this year’s Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition showed he deserved the prize with a performance of the first concerto that was sometimes disturbing, often brilliant and always compelling.
Vadim Shults
Wolf Trap Opera gala, Aug. 24, Wolf Trap
Wolf Trap’s opera companies celebrated their 40th anniversary with a starry gala in which even the weakest links were pretty darn strong, and the strongest — Lawrence Brownlee, Mary Dunleavy — offered old-school excellence that’s as good as you’ll find anywhere in the opera world today.
Sarah L. Voisin
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The Washington Post
Marc-Andre Hamelin, April 29, Strathmore (WPAS)
A thinking man’s piano virtuoso, Hamelin plunged into two centuries of repertory with the ebullience of a child leaping into a swimming pool, freshening a Haydn sonata, elucidating Stefan Wolpe’s challenging passacaglia and adding compositions of his own.
Fran Kaufman
Neeme Jarvi and the National Symphony Orchestra, May 5, Kennedy Center
The 74-year-old Jarvi is a familiar and sometimes routine figure on international podiums, but the NSO players, always idiosyncratic, responded happily to his authority and savvy, especially in the Shostakovich Sixth.
Carlos Osorio
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AP
Meredith Monk: “Songs of Ascension”
A pioneer of the avant-garde vocal scene continues to break ground with this ambitious and luminous new work comprising 21 distinct musical microclimates, adding a string quartet and other instruments to her palette of extended vocal techniques.
Courtesy of ECM Records
Steve Reich: “WTC 9/11.” Kronos Quartet
Unfortunately, debate about the cover art (featuring an image of a plane flying into the World Trade Center) overshadowed the reception of this poignant and beautiful new piece, which layers taped voices and sound in a musical collage about the process of remembering and memorializing the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Courtesy of Nonesuch Records
Jefferson Friedman: “Quartets.” Chiara Quartet, Matmos
Friedman, not yet 40, has written three pieces for the NSO. His wonderful second and third string quartets -- insistent, beautiful and often played around the country -- were finally released on a CD in strong performances by the Chiara Quartet, for whom they were written.
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Courtesy of New Amsterdam Records
Ives: “Four Sonatas.” Hilary Hahn, Valentina Lisitsa
A century on, Charles Ives’s music remains bracing and quirky, like a daguerreotype of an American landscape warped by a funhouse mirror. The four violin-piano sonatas here get appropriately sepia-toned and lyrical readings from thoughtful star violinist Hahn and pianist Lisitsa.
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Courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon
Part: “Piano Music.” Ralph van Raat
Arvo Part is beloved for his shimmering, static compositions; but his work for solo piano is neither static nor well known. The Dutch pianist van Raat changes that with a five-decade survey of the Part you didn’t know, from baroque-influenced sonatinas of 1959 to an exquisite tonal miniature from 2006, and including a ponderous concerto led by JoAnn Falletta.
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Courtesy of Naxos
10. Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in its final performance at the Kennedy Center this month.
The pioneering troupe took its final bow here with a raft of works that testified to the wit, passion and power of Cunningham’s art. Indelible memories were made. And, after “Sounddance,” ears might still be ringing.
Stephanie Berger
9. Nina Ananiashvili and the State Ballet of Georgia, at Lisner Auditorium in November.
At 48, the internationally renowned Ananiashvili has lost none of her verve and charm, which she proved in a performance with a group of talented young dancers she has groomed to represent her homeland.
Gene Schiavone
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AP
8. Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, at Wolf Trap in August.
Brown’s dancers possess one of the most pleasing aesthetics out there, a movement vocabulary of rolling fluidity and great warmth. But in a piece about resistance called “Incidents,” Brown showed us they are just as magnetic standing still.
Teddy Wolff
7. Karen Reedy Dance, at Dance Place in July.
The local troupe’s program was especially notable for including not only fine works by its director but also those by the late Eric Hampton and Karla Wolfangle.
Lois Greenfield
6. The Royal Danish Ballet’s “Napoli” and “A Folk Tale,” at the Kennedy Center in June.
Artistic Director Nikolaj Huebbe took some real risks with these reworked productions — especially in the hot-tempered 1950s setting of “Napoli” — resulting in provocative new dimensions for the classic Bournonville ballets.
Costin Radu
5. Lucinda Childs’s “Dance,” at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in April.
The modern-dance choreographer’s 1979 collaboration with composer Philip Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt swept audiences away with its maximum minimalism, a feast of subtle changes and unflagging energy.
Susan Biddle
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for The Washington Post
4. New York City Ballet in Balanchine’s black-and-white works, at the Kennedy Center in April.
Call Balanchine a tutu-burner: Grouped together, his stark, intimate leotard ballets such as “Duo Concertant” and “Apollo” prompted comparisons to the unadorned and uncorseted fashion trends of the 1960s and ’70s.
Paul Kolnik
3. Madhavi Mudgal and Alarmel Valli, at the Kennedy Center in March.
In “Samanvaya,” these two engaging women combined odissi and bharatanatyam dance styles into a portrait of feminine charm and iron firmness.
Sarah L. Voisin
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The Washington Post
2. Shantala Shivalingappa, at the Kennedy Center in March.
This engrossing kuchipudi dancer was like a one-woman commedia dell’arte troupe, shifting among characters and time periods in her evening-length work, “Swayambhu.”
Gerald Martineau
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for The Washington Post
1. Diana Vishneva in the Mariinsky Ballet’s production of “Giselle,” at the Kennedy Center in February.
Vishneva’s deeply moving performance was all the more magnificent for its subtle brush strokes. In the first act, her portrayal of the title role’s super-sensitive village girl revealed a fragile constitution pushed beyond its limit. In the second act’s spirit realm, Giselle’s ghost gradually warmed from cold numbness to a remembrance of love and, finally, to strength in the face of fate. Best of all, Vishneva added new layers to a familiar tale.
Susan Biddle
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for The Washington Post
10. “The Heir Apparent,” Shakespeare Theatre
A thoroughgoing delight from the cheeky laptop of David Ives. Performed in a priceless cavalcade of rhymed couplets, Ives’s rowdy adaptation of an early 18th-century comedy by Jean-Francois Regnard was the year’s funniest play. That it had sophisticated patrons of Shakespeare Theatre Company in stitches suggests that as inspirations for humor go, the bathroom remains the most uproarious room in the house.
Scott Suchman
9. “Photograph 51,” Theater J
Here’s a wonderful example of what you might call Washington theater’s greenhouse effect: Anna Ziegler’s sharp play about British DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin received a vital early staging by tiny Active Cultures theater in Prince George’s County, then moved up to a lively Theater J production, directed by Daniella Topol. Let’s hope for more such examples of far-sighted cooperative breeding.
Stan Barouh
8. “A Bright New Boise,” Woolly Mammoth
Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth’s artistic director, has a thing for plays forecasting and/or imagining the end of the world. This one, written by Samuel D. Hunter and directed by John Vreeke, is by a wide margin the best one he’s ever decided to produce. Michael Russotto, portraying a man hollowed out by life and aching to understand why, was simply superb as its agonized protagonist.
Tracy A. Woodward
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The Washington Post
7. “Ruined,” Arena Stage
Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the suffering of Congolese women caught in the chaotic crossfire of armed conflict received even more vibrant and affecting treatment at Arena Stage, under Charles Randolph-Wright’s direction, than it had in its fine original incarnation in New York.
Astrid Riecken
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for The Washington Post
6. "Return to Haifa," Theater J
The remarkable play by Boaz Gaon that the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv delivered to Theater J may have been more noteworthy for its conciliatory outlook on relations between Palestinians and Israelis than for the potency of the staging. But it emerged as a document of enormous symbolic importance; the D.C. Jewish Community Center deserves nothing but praise for welcoming it.
Stan Barouh
5. “King Lear,” Synetic Theater
Synetic Theater continues to startle with its wordless investigations of Shakespeare. For “Lear,” director Paata Tsikurishvili conjured a Fellini-esque world filled with bombed-out buildings and grotesque clowns, and the effect was breathtaking.
Graeme B. Shaw
4. "Trouble in Mind," Arena Stage
Bravo to Arena Stage for recruiting director Irene Lewis and her trenchant illumination of Alice Childress’s 1955 comedy-drama about the tense racial divide in the cast of an unwittingly humiliating Broadway-bound play. And an extra huzzah to the ensemble that performed it with such dexterity.
Richard Anderson
3. "Black Watch," National Theatre of Scotland at the Shakespeare Theatre
Shakespeare Theatre Company has become a net importer of brilliance, as evidenced by its presentation of the National Theatre of Scotland’s imaginatively enthralling story of a Scottish regiment dispatched to Iraq — the best play to have emerged as yet about the incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Manuel Harlan
2. “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” Woolly Mammoth
Woe unto you if you missed Mike Daisey’s captivating, consciousness-raising monologue at Woolly Mammoth Theatre about Apple’s irresistible product lines and the inhumane Chinese assembly lines on which they are manufactured.
Joan Marcus
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AP
1. “Uncle Vanya,” Sydney Theatre Company at the Kennedy Center
Cate Blanchett and her Sydney Theatre Company swooped into the Kennedy Center with a version of Chekhov’s plaintive portrait of rural Russian life that had the mesmerizing power to stun an audience out of complacency over the classics and transform one’s view of a masterpiece.
Lisa Tomasetti
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The Kennedy Center
"Possible Worlds: Photography and Fiction in Mexican Contemporary Art" at the Art Museum of the Americas
Wry and slyly subversive, literate and referential, full of the absurd and the apocalyptic, there was something haunting about this summer exhibition of contemporary Mexican photography at the Museum of the Americas. Artists such as Mauricio Alejo and Daniela Edburg were standouts in this strangely memorable show.
Courtesy Daniela Edburg
Tom Price’s "Meltdown" at Industry Gallery
A lot of stuff melts, especially plastic. Tom Price’s chairs, created by melting mounds of polypropylene rope, PVC tubing, cheap plastic rugs and old fleece clothing, were a highlight of the local gallery scene this fall, a clever recycling of material that we often condescend to...with results that look delightfully perverse and comfortable.
Photography by James Champion
"Xu Bing: Tobacco Project" at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
It was called the “Tobacco Project,” and it sounded as if it might be one of those earnest and didactic shows that flogs a theme (tobacco as a cultural commodity) to death. But Xu Bing is an artist of great imaginative resources, and his show was rich in pure visual delight, including an enormous rug made entirely of cigarettes.
Travis Fullerton
"de Kooning: A Retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (through Jan. 9)
This was the annual blockbuster at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Room after room of works by Willem de Kooning, tracing his origins back to juvenilia and through to the very end, the strange, controversial bursts of colored line he made with the help of assistants. In between was a powerful argument that his stock needs to be reevaluated, that he was an artist of greater depth and variety than we remember.
Copyright 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation
"Baroque.me: Bach Cello Suites No. 1, Prelude" visualized by Alexander Chen.
Someday, all art will be on the Internet. Maybe or maybe not. But what is emerging online today is increasingly polished and sometimes, as with this work, which visualizes a movement from Bach’s first cello suite in geometric form, wildly popular. Alexander Chen’s video went viral this year, and it deserves the acclaim.
Alexander Chen
"Possible Worlds: Photography and Fiction in Mexican Contemporary Art" at the Art Museum of the Americas
The National Building Museum tapped into Washingtonians’ strange desire to constantly refashion their city. Focusing on architectural might-have-beens and the near-misses that would have radically changed our sense of the District, “Unbuilt Washington” also raised deeper questions about the basic assumptions underlying our architecture of democracy.
Courtesy of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts
"Warhol: Headlines" (through Jan. 2)/"Andy Warhol: Shadows" (through Jan.15).
Two compelling exhibitions devoted to Andy Warhol, opening simultaneously at the National Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn, sent sparks of welcome synergy. The National Gallery took a brainy look at Warhol’s response to the news and media, while the Hirshhorn allowed visitors to bask in the visual splendor of his enormously long and variegated Shadows series from 1978-79.
The Andy Warhol MuseumPittsburghFounding CollectionContribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual ArtsInc.
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PITTSBURGH; FOUNDING COLLECTION, CONTRIBUTION THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC.
Frank Gehry concert hall for the New World Symphony in Miami
With major improvements to the dark science of acoustics, and a new understanding of how audiences can relate to classical music, we may be in a golden age of building concert halls. If that golden age has an exemplar, Frank Gehry’s new concert hall for the New World Symphony could be it. The design turns the trademark Gehry twists and curves inward, brings the audience closer to the music, and incorporates state of the art video projections without distracting from the concert experience.
Rui Dias-Aidos
"Gauguin: Maker of Myth" at the National Gallery of Art
It had been more than 20 years since the great Gauguin blockbuster at the National Gallery in 1988. The smaller but more focused exhibition that opened in February was a welcome reappraisal, organized around narrative, biographical fantasies and the artist’s self-conscious manipulation of his myth. And then there were those magnificent, terrifying paintings.
Matt McClain
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The Washington Post
National September 11 Memorial in New York City
Michael Arad’s memorial to those lost on Sept. 11, 2001, had an enormous price tag, and it went through the usual sausage-making of memorial design and construction, with some major changes to the architect’s initial vision. But the results are still powerful: a study in grandeur and serenity that is unlikely to be matched anytime soon.
Matt Rourke
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AP
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