We’ll appreciate substance over surface in music.

If you’ve got an open mind and an omnivorous soul, this was a fantastic year for music. Just a cursory glance at 2011′s slew of impressive debut albums is enough to prove that. So why is it that so many of the conversations we’ve had about music in the past 12 months have been so exhausting? We’ve debated the ratio of offensiveness to artistic validity in musicians like Lana Del Rey and Tyler, the Creator. We’ve groaned over the terribleness that is Lou Reed and Metallica’s unholy alliance. We pretended that Rebecca Black deserved our attention. The critical discourse got so icky that Maura Johnston at the Village Voice felt compelled to invent a new genre: trollgaze, “a media-agnostic genre name for those pieces of pop culture as designed for maximum Internet attention as they are pieces of art that can stand (or at least wobble) on their own.” In 2012, we’d like to turn our attention away from the musical equivalents of that kid in your third grade class who thought peeing his pants was a great way to get people to look at him, and back to the thousands of artists out there who are truly worthy of notice. And we sure hope the rest of the rest of the music world is as ready to ignore the trolls as we are.

Hollywood will invest in originality.

Prequels. Sequels. Reboots. Unnecessary American adaptations of perfectly wonderful foreign films. 2011 has been particularly awful for original filmmaking — at least in mainstream Hollywood-studio fare. No fewer that seven of the year’s top 10 grossing movies were franchise films — and that doesn’t even include Rise of the Planet of the Apes. This stuff may be working wonders at the box office, but the holiday season’s disappointing ticket sales numbers may mean that audiences are growing weary of the same old shit. And there are practical considerations here, too: If Hollywood doesn’t start rewarding original ideas, then it will eventually find it’s completely run out of material to mine from past successes.

TV will end its retromania.

Like Hollywood, TV tends to get stuck on what’s worked in the past. And recently, with the success of Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire, the current obsession is 20th-century nostalgia. But that doesn’t mean that viewers are stupid enough to confuse laughably unbelievable story lines and awful characters for great programming, just because a copycat show also features vintage wardrobes, daytime drinking, mid-century set design, and retrograde gender and racial politics. That’s why NBC’s terrible Playboy Club had to be nixed a few episodes into the season, and why the fate of ABC’s disappointingly mediocre Pan Am still hangs in the balance. Meanwhile, the BBC series The Hour was fantastic — not because it was set in a ’50s newsroom, but because the story and characters it placed there were so well crafted and compelling.

2011′s flashy art shows will bring the public back into museums in 2012.

In an end-of-year piece that spread like wildfire through the art world, New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz dismissed the recent vogue for museums booking gimmicky shows to drive up ticket sales. Calling out everyone from Marina Abramovic to Allora & Calzadilla, he focused his critique on the New Museum’s wildly popular Carsten Höller show — which famously features a slide, a carousel, and a sensory deprivation chamber. “It’s arty junk food,” he wrote, calling the trend “a vacuous vicious circle, ostensible populism masquerading as collectivity.” Although we think most of the artists Saltz mentions have merits beyond entertainment, we agree that he’s pointing out something real and troubling. But we’re also optimistic about the power of these shows to bring art to people who wouldn’t normally go to a museum. In 2012, we’re hoping that folks who were drawn in by these crowd-pleasing exhibitions will be inspired enough by the experience to delve further into the world of contemporary art.

Great literature will come out of the Occupy movement.

We’ve been inspired by 2011′s new, worldwide economic justice movement. But although there’s been great art created around it, endless talk of music’s role in it, and occasional rumors that it will turn up in such films as The Dark Knight Rises, we’ve yet to read any great literature that has come out of Occupy. And that’s absolutely fine: it takes time to write fiction and poetry, and the movement is still only a few months old. But we can’t wait to see what kinds of stories will come out of this largely youthful uprising — which has already garnered a great deal of support from high-profile writers — and hope that we’ll catch our first glimpses of it in 2012. Hey, it’ll be a great antidote to all the overeducated, middle-class problems we’ve been reading about in most recent, critically acclaimed literary fiction.

The indie-rock mainstream will re-embrace experimentalism.

In 2009, we were endlessly optimistic about indie rock. It seemed that its obsession over precious bands with literary pretensions was over and a new experimentalism was taking precedence. Wild and strange acts like Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors weren’t just winning over music critics — they were topping end-of-year lists and selling more albums than their more conventional contemporaries. But in the two years since then, their influence has been diluted, resulting in countless soundalike, chillwave AC wannabes (even Panda Bear’s 2011 album fell into that category) and too many bands that think Dirty Projectors’ thoughtful culture-hopping is an excuse to plunder global music without adding anything of their own. There’s nothing revolutionary about any of that — which perhaps explains why the indie-rock mainstream has wandered back to the belabored, faux-rustic, quasi-literary troubadour stuff that we thought had passed its expiration date. Dear music world: We don’t want more Bon Iver in 2012. We’d be happy never to see Bruce Hornsby’s name again. The Bruce Springsteen impressions are getting tired. It’s time for a challenge.

We’ll live next year as though 2012 really is the end of the world.

Maybe you believe that 2012 will bring about the apocalypse or the savior or a great period of enlightenment. Perhaps, like us, you’re a bit more skeptical and hypothesize that, besides the added drama and high stakes of a presidential election, it will be a year like any other. Either way, why not live 2012 like it’ll be your last year on Earth? If you’re like us, you procrastinate — not just at work or in school, but in your cultural life, too. You keep meaning to get to a certain art show, but it closes before you’ve made time to check it out. You want to see a certain band play, but you forget to buy tickets. There’s a book you’ve had on your to-read list for ages, but you’re too busy on Facebook and Tumblr to pick it up. In 2012, we’re going to challenge ourselves to really take advantage of the cultural riches around us and end the year with no regrets about what we didn’t see or do. We hope you will, too.

PUBLIC INTEREST
Honors magazine journalism that illuminates issues of local or national importance

The Atlantic
“God Help You, You’re on Dialysis” by Robin Fields

Marie Claire
“Still Waiting After All These Years … ,” by Ralph Blumenthal

The New Yorker
“Letting Go” by Atul Gawande

OnEarth
“What’s the Catch?” by Bruce Barcott; photographs by Corey Arnold

Texas Monthly
A two-part series by Pamela Colloff: “Innocence Lost” and “Innocence Found”

REPORTING
Honors reporting excellence as exemplified by one article or a series of articles

Harper’s Magazine
“The Guantanamo ‘Suicides’” by Scott Horton

The New York Times Magazine
“The Desert War” by Robert F. Worth

The New Yorker
“Covert Operations” by Jane Mayer

Rolling Stone
“The Runaway General” by Michael Hastings

Virginia Quarterly Review
“Digging Out” essay and photographs by Elliott D. Woods

FEATURE WRITING
Honors original, stylish storytelling

The Atlantic
“The Wrong Man” by David Freed

GQ
“The Suicide Catcher” by Michael Paterniti

Los Angeles
“The End” by Ben Ehrenreich

Mother Jones
“For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question” by Mac McClelland

The New Yorker
“The Mark of a Masterpiece” by David Grann

PROFILE WRITING
Honors news or feature stories focused on individuals or groups of closely linked individuals

The Atlantic
“Autism’s First Child” by John Donvan and Caren Zucker

Harper’s Magazine
“Own Goal” by Wells Tower

New York
“Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny” by Jonathan Van Meter

The New York Times Magazine
“The Man the White House Wakes Up To” by Mark Leibovich

The New Yorker
“The Unconsoled” by George Packer

ESSAYS & CRITICISM
Honors long-form journalism that presents the opinions of the writer on topics ranging from the personal to the political

The American Scholar
“Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz

The Antioch Review
“The Physics of Speed” by William Giraldi

The New Yorker
“The Fun Stuff” by James Wood

The Paris Review
“Mister Lytle: An Essay” by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Virginia Quarterly Review
“Lust, Devotion, and the Binary Code” by Kamin Mohammadi

COLUMNS & COMMENTARY
Honors short-form journalism that presents the views of the writer or publication

Esquire
Three “A Thousand Words About Our Culture” columns by Stephen Marche: “What’s Your Favorite War?”; “Why Is Clint Eastwood Still the Man?”; “Why Can’t Kanye West Shut the Hell Up?”

New York
Three reviews by Jerry Saltz: “Less Than the Sum of Its Parts”; “A Grand Tour”; “Judge Jerry”

The New Yorker
Three “Talk of the Town” columns by Hendrik Hertzberg: “And The Oscar Goes To”; “Puppetry”; “Iran and the Bomb”

Vanity Fair
Three columns by Christopher Hitchens: “Topic of Cancer“; “Unanswerable Prayers”; “Miss Manners and the Big C”

Vanity Fair
Three columns by James Wolcott: “The Norman Conquests”; “Barbarians at the Shore”; “The Sound of Sanity”

[via Capital]

Radon’s presence at the talk, and her blog post thereafter, are direct contradictions to Flood’s assertion that the internet is a self-mutating chat room with no narrative, history, or scope. And what was the curator’s purpose in revealing that he “just found out about blogs three months ago”? Is it a confusing and convoluted ruse, a plot designed to jumpstart a new discussion in the arts community? Read what else Radon recorded after the jump and judge for yourselves.

On the internet:

I just found out about blogs three months ago. The internet is still a ghetto.

On reporting via blogs:

Blogs are like being out on a prairie and one prairie dog pops up; none of the others can see it, but they can feel the movement in the earth. So another pops up. And another. They are not communicating with each other. They have no idea. History means nothing to them. Truth means nothing to them. They have no mechanism in place for checking [facts].

On culture in recessionary times:

Culture is seen as a luxury. If you have been hit by the economy, by unemployment, it’s very easy to get riled up about the culture and the money your government spends for it.

On New York mag critic Jerry Saltz and Facebook:

You may have heard of this critic named Jerry Saltz. He has a second career on Facebook. And it’s terrifying. He has 5,000 subscribers. And he calls them, “My Thebans,” “my children,” “my army.” And we’re looking at it and asking ourselves, “How did we get to Benito Mussolini’s website?” These scare tactics. I think it’s dangerous. He has no understanding of what he’s enabling his people to do … with the aggressive spirit in this country.

We can only hope that Rhizome director Lauren Cornell, head of the experimental and technology-driven online arts platform since 2003, can tutor Flood on how constructive discourse in the online sphere can only help the New Museum. After all, why should a curator whose made an admirable career of promoting radical, envelope-pushing artists expect the audience who consumes their work to swallow any institution’s ideology hook, line, and sinker?

We weren’t in attendance at Flood’s Portland talk, but we’re curious to hear what you think about the issues he raised. Is hyperlinking a good enough tool for communication across the web? What’s missing from online arts coverage that could ostensibly satisfy both a museum’s message and its audience’s taste for transparency?

[All quotes via Hyperallergic]

@cmonstah

Who: Carolina A. Miranda, blogger for C-MONSTER

Why: She’s smart, she’s funny, and she manages to take the piss out of art world pomp-and-circumstance while maintaining her enthusiasm for art and artists.

@lindsaypollock

Who: Lindsay Pollock, arts market journalist who reports for Bloomberg, The Art Newspaper, and others.

Why: She’s got the inside track not just on the art market, but the media covering the market. Her recent live-Tweet of the Ai Weiwei panel at the Paley Center on digital activism is topical and dishy.

@artfagcity

Who: Paddy Johnson, founder and writer of Art Fag City

Why: Johnson’s an instigator, which makes for entertaining reading. Snark aside, she’s ever-present and well informed, mixing in art reviews from her blog and The L magazine with gossipy asides and up-to-the-minute reporting.

@TylerGreenDC

Who: Tyler Green, writer/critic on Modern Art Notes

Why: Green, based in DC, manages to be almost omniscient in the sphere of art media, mired in everything from reporting on endangered land art to scrapping with Jerry Saltz to creating a bracket for The Greatest Living American Abstract Painter.

@ARTnewsmag

Who: Robin Cembalest, executive editor at ARTNews

Why: ARTNews is the most widely-circulated print publication on the topic of art, and Cembalest’s Tweets are a good indicator of where the magazine’s interests lie.

@museumnerd

Who: Anonymous

Why: Live updates from museum exhibitions: maybe not so fun for Museum Nerd, but plenty informative for us. This Twitter also has a fairly wide scope, embracing not just fine arts museums but arts advocacy and education.

@escapeintolife

Who: Lethe Bashar, editor of Escape into Life online journal

Why: Bashar incorporates poetry, essays, and video into the publication’s visually compelling portfolios. For the most part, Bashar keeps his Twitter feed simple and to the point, with a host of links to featured artists.

@juliaxgulia

Who: Julia Kaganskiy, art and social media Bright Young Thing who organizes the Arts, Culture & Technology meetup.

Why: Well, (a) art and (b) social media. She’s young, connected, and excited about spreading the good word. Though she’s currently a MoMA intern, we haven’t read too much dirt, but here’s hoping for a surreptitiously Tweeted Marina Abramovic encounter.

@jerrysaltz

Who: Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York mag

Why: Because everyone in art follows him, even though he’s only Tweeted twice at current tally. We hope he’ll embrace the Twitter-monster the same way he has Facebook; what better channel for starting a flame war over gender parity in art institutions?

@powhida

Who: William Powhida, artist

Why: The 140 character equivalent of Powhida’s needling of the art world establishment. Earlier this month, we followed along as the artist conducted #class at Winkleman Gallery in Manhattan.

Bonus link: The New Age Cavemen and the City

New York mag art critic Jerry Saltz, he of the gender parity crusade at MoMA and Glenn Beck challenge, profiles seven female artists in this week’s issue. Saltz points out that 36 percent of New York gallery solo shows are featuring women this fall, up from 17 percent in 2005, and highlights a cross-section of “gender-bending” work by women, including a full-scale museum show by multimedia artist Roni Horn at The Whitney.

© Roni Horn and courtesy of the Whitney Museum Of American Art: “You Are the Weather [detail],” (1994-95).

In collaboration with the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art is displaying a mid-career retrospective of Roni Horn, including her incisive portraiture photography, abstracted cast glass sculpture, and cut and dyed drawings. Some of Horn’s more ambiguous work belies what Saltz terms an “Apollonian aesthetic,” a “poetic” study of perception.

Exhibition poster showing the anagram title; Adam Reich/courtesy of Deitch Projects: “Here and Now/and Nowhere” installation view.

Tauba Auerbach’s “Here and Now/ And Nowhere” exhibition at Deitch Projects (also home to Swoon, Kristin Baker, and Elizabeth Neel) pairs the artist’s cerebral trompe l’oeil color field paintings with a pump organ installation and other works meant to examine order versus randomness.  The so-called Auerglass gets a workout each day at 5 p.m. from Auerbach and partner Canerib Naskrew — the instrument only works when two people play.

Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York: “Tear (2008) and “One Another” (2008).

Luhring Augustine kicks off its fall programming with work by Janine Antoni that portrays the body as a measure of the surrounding world — or, as Antoni puts it, “The body becomes a funnel through which the world has been poured.” Digital C-prints of stretched skin and an installation combining video of a blinking eye with a lead wrecking ball and construction site soundtrack explore ideas of destruction, motherhood, and fantasy.

Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash: “Astride Mama Burro, Now Dead” (2007) and “Doyle, CA: Cuervo Saying It Won’t Come and to Quit So We Can Drive to The Gas Station and Buy More Wine” (2007).

In “This Train is Bound for Glory” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Justine Kurland’s documentary-style photos capture a subculture of nomads and hobos that speak to the artist’s wanderlust. Infused with an edge often seen in the literary works of uber-masculine writers like Hemingway and Kerouac, Kurland‘s photographs are laden with a sense of manifest destiny and noticeably absent of the stereotypical “woman making art” perspective.

Related: Our gallery of female artists to watch in 2009.

Say the phrase “female contemporary artist” and you’re likely to conjure, via Google or collective memory, images of Cecily Brown’s writhing bodies; Tracey Emin’s messy, suggestive bed; Lisa Yuskavage’s kitschy soft porn; or Vanessa Beecroft’s nude installations. The financial success of such in-your-face sexuality — whether viewed with icy remove (Beecroft), humor (Yuskavage), or brassiness (Emin) — dovetailed nicely with the Third Wave feminism popularized in the early nineties. So what’s next for the double-X chromosome creative set in our current period? Photo evidence and a few words from art critic Jerry Saltz after the jump.

We bring up Jerry Saltz as a fellow crusader for the equal representation of women artists in major institutions, specifically MoMA, whose bone he’s been picking since 2004 when he was with the Village Voice. Now senior art critic for New York magazine, Saltz has once again picked up the mantle and has made his case (via Facebook, naturally) against the Painting & Sculpture galleries of the world’s foremost modern art museum. Though he’s arguing for a more balanced ratio of male: female works from the Modernist era, MoMA’s investigation of the issue would set a precedent for gender parity in the contemporary sector.

Though Young British Artists like Emin and Sarah Lucas achieved notoriety and helped pave the way for recent art school grads, their thematic, confessional female spirit is mostly absent from the contemporary pieces shown in our image gallery. Are these new artists less sensationalized because their work is devoid of the unabashed, sexual female perspective? Or are we, in an oh-so-gender-conscious 21st century, still an artistic society in the throes of masculine hero worship?

As The Independent reports in an article detailing the Max Mara art prize for women, the art market is greatly skewed to favor men, as “Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Lucian Freud vie for the title of the world’s most expensive living artist.” To wit, a Jeff Koons sculpture from his “Hanging Heart” series sold two years ago at Sotheby’s for$23.6 million, while the most expensive piece ever sold by a living female artist (a painting by recent MoMA exhibitor Marlene Dumas) clocks in at $3.34 million. Not too shabby, but still a ways to go.

Check out the slideshow and get familiar with the latest crop of female artists on our radar screen.

The text panel prefacing The Problem Perspective, the first major U.S. retrospective of German artist Martin Kippenberger, opens with a quote from Aristotle: “everything in moderation.” It then continues with the following statement: “Martin Kippenberger never got this message.”

Curatorial assistance or not, it doesn’t take long to pick up on the Dionysian overtones of Kippenberger’s work. At the entrance to The Problem Perspective an oat-covered Ford Capri peeks out into the foyer (a nudge to Anselm Kiefer) and continuing through the exhibit, the viewer passes by drunken street lamps (which unlike sober ones weave in and out of walls) deprecating self-portraits, and a junkie’s forest populated by disco balls, wooden pills, and ominously headless birch trees.

Kippenberger’s sculptures — like all of his work — are slyly incendiary and occasionally infantile, recalling the themes of Mike Kelley and the aesthetic of a perverse Claes Oldenburg. While Kippenberger’s targets vary from Neo-Expressionism to Pop, his work is especially damning when he takes aim at himself. In his “Martin Into the Corner You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself” series (view the E-Card version here), a mannequin in Kippenberger’s clothes stands in a corner. Arms folded behind him, his resin head swims with cigarettes.

Stepping outside of Kippenberger’s bizarre universe of drugs and self-portraiture, the most striking piece in the exhibit is actually housed four floors below: The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’. Intended to invoke the novel’s Oklahoma recruitment center, the work is a sprawling and cacophonous installation that combines classic works of 20th century design with a pastiche of absurdist objects (Barbie bathtubs and oversized fried eggs are prominently featured). Between its surrealism and Kafkaesque obliqueness, the viewer is ultimately left at a loss, forced to either marvel at its scope or puzzle over Kippenberger’s views on literary interpretation.

Throughout his career, which MoMA curators describe as “a twenty-year commitment to unrestrained excess,” Kippenberger drew from a wide range of sources with an eye towards rejecting them, grounding his work in opposition to easy labels. Riffing on everyone from Picasso to Richter (in the “Peter” sculptures, one of his monochromes is transformed into a coffee table), Kippenberger both recycles and demonizes the art world, and in this ambivalence, forges the overarching theme of his career. Through pieces like Heil Hitler You Fetishists, and With the Best Will in the World I Can’t See a Swastika, Kippenberger toes the limits of acceptable transgression, recasting the controversies of Germany’s troubled past in the vocabulary of art. While critics have dismissed Kippenberger as a jester or fire starter, as New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz recently remarked, Kippenberger’s best work comes from the understanding that he is “obviously battling with art history.”

Between Kippenberger’s volatile personality and the prolific range of his work, The Problem Perspective could easily have been a disaster, but remarkably, it isn’t. Rather than pigeonhole him as an artist or fail to acknowledge the disparate strands of his career, the retrospective is held together by a sensitivity towards his tormented relationship to his field. In light of this, and considering the breadth and eclecticism of his oeuvre, perhaps another Aristotle quote is in order to complement the first one: “No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.”