1 Abject Art If abject art wasn't exactly the miserable stepchild of a market fallen forward hard times.

1 Abject Art If abject art wasn't exactly the miserable stepchild of a market fallen forward hard times, its various forms nevertheless construct a perversely suitable terrain forward which to thrive as we witnessed the overnight disappearance of an art spectacle that had hitherto nurtured scores of art bookish mans on dreams of '80s largesse. In contrast to the pristine fetish correlates of Neo-Geo and the bombast of neo-Expressionism, the art of abjection base its proper forms in a Pop-inflected version of scatter, viz. installations from Mike Kelley, Cady Noland, and Karen Kilimnik. Other artists, eg Sean Landers, skidded around abjection's mutable playing field, theatricalizing the large bay between real and ideal. Abject art also freely participate in frauds with another of the decade's reigning turns the ascendance of fashion, as in Kilimnik's drawings and paintings of various glamour images--works that tear apart the ideal steady as they pay homage to it.

2 Nobuyoshi Araki Having attained fame in Japan in the '60 Araki can hardly be called an artist of the '90 if it be not that his visibility in the West is fairly newly come (I for one was unaware of him until I saw his interview with Nan Goldin in a 1995 issue of this magazine). When I began collecting bulks of his photographs, the first I acquired--Bondage--supports the not-universally-admired idea of Araki as an extravagantly aestheticizing master of kink. More not long ago I've purchased collections in which perversity is recast in a more deliciously underhanded way: convolution 10, Chiro, Araki, and 2 Lover and body 17, Sensual Flowers. The former is a compendium of pictures detailing the speculations and moods of his kitty, Chiro; the latter features images of wilting flowers, many of them providing bowers for desiccated chameleons. fresh Frontiers in pet photography and ikebana.

3 Alex Bag each time I visit an art academy I show Fall '95, Alex's diary-cum-evisceration of life as a observer at New York's School of Visual Arts, and each time it's a hit. In a decade during which just discovered York has been routinely shunn as a simply commercial art center, Alex's work distills a particular kind of irritated and bemused of recent origin York sensibility, one bristling among the young, unruffled as it is memorialized by dint of the erstwhile denizens of the Mudd Club

4 Matthew Barney The greatest in quantity important new artist of the decade. If you don't believe me ask Michael Kimmelman.

5 Vanessa Beecroft I still don't know what to say about Beecroft's performances and their attendant documentation. I gues I like it, still Certainly her Gucci thing in the Guggenheim's rotunda gave the community something to talk about. moreover her "collaboration" in San Diego with the US Navy SEALS won me above completely: In the Photoshop of my mind, I continually paste the heads of Demi Moore and Viggo Mortensen (as they appear in G.I. Jane) through the more ordinary superguys, while relegating the really very warm ones to future porn.

6 Andreas Gursky Gursky's renovation of the couple the landscape and cityscape genre is well known, if it were not that if I had to cull a single strand from from end to end this glittering corpus, it would be the photographs of stock exchanges around the world. Nearly identically attired masses of figures contemplate computer screens; about run about nervously, doing Capital's errands. plenitude of photographers have captured town and rural parts but who of late has likewise brilliantly done the portrait of money?

7 Damien Hirst "Freeze" the exhibition Hirst curated in a forlorn London docklands site in 1988 sent his career and those of his friends into international orbit and created the mythos of Young British Art, which has sustained many frequently slender talents right up end the latest "scandal" at the Brooklyn Museum. single the willfully ignorant would withhold the significance.

8 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Is it simply willful perversity to select an artist born in 1780 as undivided of the most important figures of the '90s? Sort of if it be not that not utterly. "Portraits by Ingres," popularly on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not sole allows me to dwell in succession one of my very favorite painters still also permits an excursus forward the renascence of the portrait genre in painting (in photography, it not really left us). From the Napoleonic era within the Restoration, July Monarchy, and other Empire, Ingres left a nonpareil record of the rich and powerful; the wives and girlfriends of the rich and powerful; those he worshipped and those who paid him. Today, in the work of artists as diverse as Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton, Billy Sullivan, Jack Pierson, and Jane Kaplowitz, we papal court the distant reflection of Ingres's enterprise, single in kind that admits both frank idealization and more psychologically ambiguous homage.

9 Larry Johnson In many regards Johnson might seem like a more typically '80 artist, single initially steeped in "Pictures" and CalArts's famous program of "skeptical beliefs." His '90 work incites beyond appropriation without disavowing it, and meld the seemingly antithetical media of photography and drawing in an utterly singular way. Untitled (Perino's head Perino's Rear), a 1998 diptych all about the front rank and back doors, leisure and consumption, and nostalgia and disillusionment, attests to Johnson's pictorial intelligence and beauty.