Good, bad and a fresh new ‘Thing’

THE year 2005 was the best of art times, and it was the worst of art times.

* The UCLA Hammer Museum offered an invigorating survey of new art that crystallized an emerging sensibility among younger artists, braced against the feeling of dissolution so prevalent now. “Thing: New Sculpture From Los Angeles” was a rarity -- a fresh and meaningful overview. That it was also composed almost entirely of work by new artists gave the show an exploratory edge, unusual for an institutional scene more commonly addicted to sure bets.

* The all-new Museum of Modern Art, despite the welcome public return of its unparalleled permanent collection, sailed right past the Guggenheim as the Manhattan museum aficionados love to hate. Some of the complaints are silly -- Popularity breeds crowds! -- but others are not. Among the most telling disappointments: MoMA launched its special exhibition program with an innocuous show drawn from a big-money corporate collection, then concluded the year with a flimsy retrospective of local artist Elizabeth Murray, whose formidable promise in the 1980s never panned out.

* L.A. artist Yoshua Okun produced an incisive video animation that proposed a slick new monument for Washington’s National Mall. Sited at the White House on America’s front lawn and backed by an ominous helicopter soundtrack, a colossal pair of sleek, rotating golden letters -- US -- dwarfs the nearby Washington and Lincoln memorials. In a swooping graphic style familiar from the Fox News Channel or Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” our current state of imperial rapacity assumes car-wreck form: horrible and hypnotizing.

* In Berlin, the monumental sterility of New York architect Peter Eisenman’s immense Holocaust memorial offered a grim warning about the fate that seems destined to befall the similarly conflicted site for New York’s planned 9/11 memorial. A pretentious gray field of 2,711 tilting concrete blocks transformed the implacable banality of evil into an unintended playground for kiddy games of hide-and-seek and tourists’ souvenir snapshots. Memorials embody society’s ideals, which today means they’re entertainment destinations for cultural tourism.

* Two very different works lifted the Venice Biennale out of its typical torpor. Barbara Kruger covered the Fascist-era facade of the 1932 Italian pavilion with a “tattoo.” Her digitally printed vinyl mural sported chilling, oddly familiar utterances, such as “You make history when you do business” and “Admit nothing, blame everyone,” neatly articulating the convergence of corporation and state that describes fascism’s evil heart. Across the Grand Canal on the Giudecca, Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli showed a one-hour video -- “The Non-Love Meetings” -- that crossed a TV game show with a reality program. In a blaze of cathode-ray illumination, contemporary sexual mores burned to a crisp.

* The artistic vacancy of the current leadership at the J. Paul Getty Trust took center stage when the institution acquired the spotty collection of Modern sculpture assembled by Hollywood producer Ray Stark. The Getty has no curatorial expertise in Modern sculpture, the collection comes tangled in strings and the late collector most wanted his sculpture to end up at the L.A. County Museum of Art, where he was a trustee. Rather than help achieve that meaningful goal, the Getty took the meaningless step of trumpeting high-priced celebrity.

* In a remarkable array of sculptural events employing light, space, color, transparency and reflection, Danish artist Olafur Eliasson temporarily transformed a Neo-Modernist house on a Pasadena hillside into a Postmodern Plato’s cave.

* The profit motive encroached further on the traditional mission of America’s art museums, as LACMA handed over its galleries to an entertainment conglomerate for King Tut, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, rented out yet more of its Impressionist paintings to a Las Vegas subsidiary of New York’s PaceWildenstein Gallery.