Slavoj Zizek
Hegel thought that, in the movement of history, the world spirit passes from one country to another, from the East to the West. Something similar happened at the beginning of the 21st century: the world spirit passed from cinema, the art of the 20th century, to the TV series. At the top of my list are three sci-fi dystopias: Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, which takes place in a world just a little ahead of ours where tendencies we clearly discern today have become reality; Patrick Somerville’s Station Eleven, a uniquely optimistic utopia depicting how performing art can save the human spirit after a global apocalypse; and Three-Body, a Chinese miniseries based on Liu Cixin’s novel, much better than its English Netflix remake. Plus I should add Alfonso Cuaron’s non-dystopian Disclaimer, the best exemplification of Hegel’s thesis that evil resides in a gaze which sees evil everywhere around it. If these TV series are not the peak of art today then this word is meaningless.
Martin Gayford
The most remarkable artistic phenomenon of the 21st century has been the resurgence of painting. Numerous artists have created extraordinary paintings since the millennium. As a manifestation of the power of the brush, however, what could top the exhibition David Hockney 25 which has just closed at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris? I nominate this overwhelming display of creativity as the masterpiece of the century. The great majority of works in this massive array date from the last quarter-century. Not all were strictly speaking paintings, but all of them demonstrated that a handmade image of the world, seen through the eyes of an individual, remains a perennially fresh and valid approach. As Hockney himself likes to say, there’s always a new way of doing it.
Graeme Thomson
The return of Kate Bush to the stage in 2014, after an absence of 35 years, to perform a 22-date residency at the Hammersmith Apollo was an event before it even happened. Before The Dawn duly lived up to the hype, delivering a richly imaginative spectacle of live music, theatre, technology, puppetry – even (lame) comedy. Though gauche and over-reaching in parts, it was a fitting summation of a stellar career (Bush has done nothing since), commendably giving her masterpiece, Aerial, top billing. Though some shows were filmed, the results have never been released. And with only scraps of illicit smartphone footage escaping online, Before The Dawn has retained its power, magic and mythos, making it this century’s preeminent You Had To Be There pop event.
Lloyd Evans
No living dramatist has surpassed Jez Butterworth’s state-of-the-nation play Jerusalem, which premièred at the Royal Court in 2009. Mark Rylance starred as the sexy and indomitable outlaw Rooster Byron. The centenary of Terence Rattigan’s birth in 2011 created fresh interest in his work. Trevor Nunn’s stunning production of Flare Path, with Sheridan Smith, revealed Rattigan as a great humanist who can switch effortlessly between profound emotion and dark comedy. Thea Shurrock directed a wonderful version of his overlooked play After the Dance, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll as two wealthy, indolent lovers torn apart by alcoholism and infidelity. In 2010, Michael Grandage’s production of King Lear at the Donmar Warehouse included a sublime array of stage effects. Derek Jacobi played the broken king as a hapless, needy drifter who experiences the storm scene as a terrifying hallucination. Jacobi whispered his lines while the thunder raged silently in his head. An unforgettable show.
Damian Thompson
The first solo piano masterpiece of the 21st century may turn out to be its longest: Michael Finnissy’s History of Photography in Sound, premièred in 2001, lasts five and a half hours. It makes almost insane demands on soloist and listener alike – almost relentlessly atonal, but employing the super-
virtuosic diablerie of Alkan. Indeed, Finnissy explores Alkan’s ideas, offering us a more extreme version of the chromatic abandon with which the French pioneer toyed with Mozart and other composers. But that is just one section of the epic. If you stare at Finnissy’s musical ‘photographs’ for long enough you’ll make out half-buried Bach chorales, re-harmonised Berlioz, Gregorian chant, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag’, Inuit folk music and fragments of Götterdämmerung. It’s worth the effort, though you don’t have to consume it all at once. A few years ago I heard the only pianist to have mastered the score, the magnificent Ian Pace, play the whole thing and I got lost. So did the bloke in the row behind me. ‘Which bit is next?’ he asked, and when I turned round it was the composer.
Richard Bratby
This is a mug’s game. The 1957 Penguin Guide to Chamber Music took its best guess at posterity and ended up with one paragraph on Shostakovich and an entire chapter about Ernest Bloch. The most loved orchestral work of the millennium so far is almost certainly John Williams’s score for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Only one must not say so.
But I’m willing to take a punt on Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht. Completed in 2003, this insanely ambitious 29-hour opera cycle – once routinely dismissed as proof that the old hippy had finally lost it – has revealed its full stature since Stockhausen’s death in 2007. Vast, playful and borderline-impossible to perform, Licht inspires Wagner-level devotion in its performers and (almost uniquely in this century) speaks to audiences far beyond the classical ghetto. The whole seven-day cycle still hasn’t been performed in its entirety, but just wait: it
will be.
Sam Kriss
Despite claiming that art has no value on a warming planet, Just Stop Oil are, essentially, an art collective: like a lot of artists they pretend they’re actually political activists; like a lot of artists they work by refashioning existing works; unlike a lot of artists their work is actually visually interesting. It turns out that every painting is dramatically improved by having a screaming person glued to it.
Camille Paglia
Little in today’s monotonous arts landscape could even remotely be classified as ‘great’. We are languishing in a period of rote ideology and diminished craftsmanship. However, I would nominate for greatness a stunning music video of the song ‘Julie’ (2015), written and performed by American musician Rhiannon Giddens, accompanying herself on banjo. It is a magnificent contribution to the epochal folk song tradition that was transplanted from the British Isles to North America.
Inspired by a book about slave narratives, Giddens constructs a charged dialogue between a wealthy plantation mistress and her woman slave, about to be liberated by advancing Yankee troops. The voices are soft and intimate, but the brutal reality of slavery suddenly breaks through. This song is an inspired work of art that repetition cannot dim. See her perform it online on David Holt’s music show. There is no callow postmodernist irony here – just blazing rage and purity of emotion.
James Delingpole
I think it has to be Succession a) to annoy the people who think it should have been magisterial but overwrought Breaking Bad or the mumbly and tedious The Wire, b) because Game of Thrones blew its chances with its execrable last season, c) because it was created by one of our own, Jesse Armstrong and d) because it’s dark, witty, funny, cynical, replete with pornographically sumptuous locations, brilliantly acted, surreal yet horribly plausible, and pretty close to pure genius.
Geoff Dyer
Christian Marclay’s The Clock is about time, obviously, but it also has an effect on space. After it opened in London in October 2010 and word of its magic spread, The Clock transformed the experience of spending time in central London. Whenever you had time to kill you could pop into White Cube to catch bits of The Clock. And then you began re-arranging your life so that you could see new sequences, new times. Once in, it was difficult to tear yourself away from this 24-hour compilation of moments in films when people consult a watch, or scenes when a clock in the background announces the time. Across multiple genres and shifting geographies, this all unfolds in real time: filmic time always in perfect synch with external time. A clever idea, obviously, that also demonstrates something about the essence of cinema: the agelessness of its stars, the shaping power of filmic myths. Plus there is never a dull moment; it is so exciting, so much fun. More than that, actually: it is the greatest story ever told. And somewhere in the world it’s still happening now.
Jonathan Meades
Infrastructure and works of civil engineering enjoy a gamut of factual, objective qualifiers – size, stress, height, volume, etc. Adjectives that hint at aesthetic appreciation are not part of the deal. The strict separation of architecture (fantastical) and engineering (practical) – notoriously manifest at St Pancras – remains a routine programme. The Millau Viaduct does not adhere to this exhausted formula. Where design starts and the business of linking onelimestone causse to its distant neighbour begins is moot. The coalescence of engineer (Michel Virlogeux) and architect (Norman Foster) is total. Their union has produced a work of sheer sublimity which enhances the terrain and matches in wonder the farouche heights of the southern Aveyron. It is in rather than of the landscape.
Lynn Barber
I love Renzo Piano’s Shard which opened in 2012. I love its elegance and clarity. Unfortunately most people probably see it from London Bridge station which is too close: it is much better seen from a distance, and preferably at dawn or sunset when you can see how it changes with the light. Sometimes, the top is lost in clouds but sometimes, when the air is very polluted, you can only see the top and not the shaft. Although it is the tallest building in the UK, it is somehow modest and unassertive, unlike, say, the hideous Walkie Talkie. There were fears when it was being built that it would overshadow or diminish St Paul’s Cathedral but on the contrary; if you look down Farringdon Lane where you get a fine view of them both, the Shard seems like a courteous servant waiting to take a plump dowager’s coat.
Igor Toronyi-Lalic
1600-25? Impossible – Monteverdi, Caravaggio, Shakespeare. 1700-25? Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. 1800-25? Beethoven’s piano sonatas, without question. 1900-25? Diaghilev and Stravinsky, by a whisker. For 2000-25 someone should say the internet but it won’t be me. Because the correct answer is Apichatpong Weerasethakhul (A-peach-a-pong We’re-ascetical): Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady, Syndromes, Cemetery of Splendour, the shorts, the installations, the astonishing theatre work Fever Room. An unsurpassed dream diary with a single dud: Memoria, ruined by that Japanese knotweed of cinema Tilda Swinton. But I could easily have picked anything by Pierre Huyghe, Rebecca Saunders’s Us Dead Talk Love, Trajal Harrell’s Maggie the Cat, Andrew Hamilton’s Music for People who Like Art, Neil Luck’s Regretfully Yours, Ongoing, Gerald Barry/Richard Jones’s Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, much by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ryan Trecartin and (La)Horde… Not quite on a par with the early 1600s but a strong start. Those, however, who I can only assume never leave the house will insist we’re living through a dark age.
Craig Raine
The greatest artwork of the 21st century so far might be quite a small painting, ‘September’, by Gerhard Richter: 52cm x 72cm. Its palette is modest, bled – faded asbestos blue; grey; charcoal; grey-white – and subtly opposed to the magnitude of its subject. Which is 9/11 and the attack on the Twin Towers. It was painted in 2005. It is an abstract that is compellingly figurative, yet austerely resistant to rhetoric. It consists of two verticals and several horizontal broken brush strokes, discontinuous right across the canvas – the Twin Towers and the planes as planes. The top of the picture is a dark pall, through which the canvas shows an almost invisible gold filigree. Everything is muted – the purged colours, the subtle imagery. The painting is beautiful, calm and classical. Olympian and contingent. Achieved and indescribable.
Liz Anderson
Ocean with David Attenborough. This is a masterpiece with a message. Stunning cinematography, with spectacular shots of coral reefs and algae as well as turtles, sharks, whales and exotic fish… A watery paradise? Er, not exactly. We are also shown huge ‘bottom trawling’ fish factory ships plundering and wrecking everything on the seabed. Will this be the end of marine life as we know it? Not necessarily. Attenborough is cautiously optimistic: if we enlarge the no-take ocean zones, nature can bounce back to life. If we save the sea, we save our world. We have been warned.
Julie Burchill
I’d have to say Sugar Rush. Which is not as egotistical as it sounds, because I’m talking about the 2006 C4 series (no longer available for streaming: was it something that I said?) rather than my 2004 young adult novel. The Brighton shoot was one of the highpoints of my life. The leads, Olivia Hallinan and Lenora Crichlow, were unbelievably good. And I got to meet a very young Andrew Garfield when he appeared as Olivia’s clueless suitor. (He was without doubt the politest person I’ve ever met, thanking me for ‘this opportunity’.) I made it clear to the writers from the start (the principal one being the fantastically talented Katie Baxendale) that I trusted them to rewrite it the way they thought best. And so a B+ novel was turned into a brilliant television show. And it won an International Emmy.
Sam Leith
As a devoted World of Warcraft player, I’m tempted to nominate that grandaddy of massively multiplayer online worlds: certainly, few games can consume so many thousands of hours of player time so enjoyably. But it’s grindy. Red Dead Redemption 2, for wannabe cowboys? Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for fantasy adventure? We’re spoiled for choice. But I’m going to plump for 2011’s Portal 2, sequel to 2007’s fabulously original Portal. It’s a first-person shooter where nobody gets shot, and it’s an ingenious puzzle/platform game and it tells a story involving a mad computer, a potato and some fictitious cake. Also, unlike almost every other game ever made, it’s funny.
Deborah Ross
What to pick as the best film in 25 years? We can see off There Will Be Blood (2007) as that’s top of everyone’s list and we are better than that. We can also see off Paddington 2 (2017), even though it has a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes alongside Citizen Kane and Singin’ in the Rain, as we will look like fools. After many sleepless nights – not true, but we can pretend? – I finally decided to go with Sean Baker’s Anora (2024). It’s still fresh in the memory, so maybe that’s why, but it touched me deeply and even months later I still often think about it. It won an Oscar, as did its star Mikey Madison who plays a sex worker. You could say there’s nothing new in showing us how the feckless rich toy with the lives of the poor but this comes at it in a way that’s original, compelling, complex and hauntingly tender. I’ve seen it three times and it has never failed to feel fresh. Phew. I can sleep again now, thank God.
Dean Kissick
documenta 14, curated by Adam Szymczyk in 2017, was an exhibition that slowly built into the greatest artistic experience I have had. Titled ‘Learning from Athens’, it opened there and in Kassel and took forgotten avant-gardes, anti-fascism, postcolonial thought, and extremely obscure folk art as its foundations – not all my favourite themes, but Szymczyk knotted them together into a dauntingly ambitious, dazzlingly complex, and even very beautiful show. He attempted to contain the entire world in 47 venues in Athens and 35 in Kassel, and soared €7 million over budget while doing so, inadvertently crippling documenta, marking the highpoint of lavishly publicly funded, deeply esoteric exhibitions, and completely wrecking his own career in the process. But he succeeded on his own terms. Radical, experimental, chaotic, provocative, challenging, wildly ambitious, impossible for any one person to wholly take in, bankrupt, mad, it was the masterpiece of the century.
Nicky Haslam
Apart from Daphne Guinness, the greatest 21st-century work of art must surely be the recently completed Schwarzman building in Oxford. Andrew Barnett of Hopkins Architects has created something of totally contemporary classicism and intimate grandeur, ingeniously harmonious to its hallowed setting… the ultimate in civiltà.
Laura Gascoigne
The term ‘great art’ always grated on me – even pre-Trump it sounded loud and macho – and ‘best’, when applied to art, is not much better. How do you measure painting against sculpture, video against installation? So I’ve gone for ‘most memorable’ and chosen an exhibition: Age of Terror, the Imperial War Museums’s chilling 2017 survey of art in the shadow of the Twin Towers. What still haunts me is Israeli artist Omer Fast’s film about drone warfare 5,000 Feet is the Best – then considered by the US Air Force the optimal height from which to strike human targets in Afghanistan with unmanned aerial vehicles operated by ‘pilots’ based 7,000 miles away in the Nevada desert. To illustrate the clarity of the image, footage of a child cycling through a Las Vegas suburb was contrasted with film of a family setting out on holiday from a suburb of Kabul. The child survived; the family was blown up. It all felt very far away at the time; it feels closer now.
Rory Sutherland
Narcos and Mad Men. These were the Y-chromosome’s revenge for being made to watch Sex and the City. Oh and also that thing Elon does where he lands a rocket back on the launchpad.
Simon Heffer
To me the finest artistic achievement of the century so far is the Requiem, Opus 48, by Ian Venables. He was commissioned to write it in 2017 and it had its première a year later. He then orchestrated it – the original format is choir and organ – and this shows the depths of Venables’s musical talent, and leaves his admirers hoping for more orchestral writing from a composer rightly regarded as the finest composer of art songs in Britain today. Venables writes music of the sort that people, as opposed to the typical music critic, want to hear: tuneful, memorable and moving, and firmly in the tradition of English choral music – a tradition some of us see no reason to abandon just because of the more experimental currents in classical music, many of which sound as though they are designed actively against the listener. In selecting Venables’s Requiem I believe I have chosen a work that will live on and grow in popularity: I struggle to think of many other works of art or architecture of the last quarter century for which one can say the same.
Nina Power
angelicism01 is a person, a group of people, an idea, a cult, and a feeling. Born of a combination of technology and the end of the world, their work Film01 (2023) has been screened all over the world and online, in multiple cuts. Film01 is an attempt to make sense of the internet, using an older cultural form to distill the essence of the contemporary. It’s a bewildering ride, like jacking every platform into your eyes and ears at once: a sensorium assault of great beauty, sadness and ghostliness. A million young women dance for the camera while the world faces extinction: what nature documentaries look like when the virtual has fully collapsed into reality.
Lauren Oyler
What does it mean when a critic asks, ‘What does it mean to be alive today?’ Shouldn’t you just know? No: we have to tell you.
Tino Sehgal’s ‘This is so contemporary’ (2004) – in which a group of performers dressed as museum guards leap to their feet and begin to sing and dance – is what happens in the mind of a critic when she is confronted with the overwhelming significance of the now. ‘This is so contemporary!’ cry the guards, jazz-handed and smiling. ‘Contemporary, contemporary!’ Then they sing the details of the work under consideration: the artist, the year, the courtesy line.
The people of the past are necessarily blinkered. It isn’t their fault. The people of the present can see that, because we are special. We are, after all, determining the future. A great work of art must represent this situation: it should speak for the present, take the past into account, and endure into the future. In the 21st century, that means it should be hilariously, annoyingly, and unfortunately timeless.
Calvin Po
What building made this century would a heritage officer recommend for listing? In the way that one might search Shropshire or Lancashire for cradles of the Industrial Revolution, we might find our century’s counterpart in Hampshire. Ocado’s first robot-driven ‘fulfilment centre’ in Andover, unveiled in 2016, exemplifies our zeitgeist’s obsession with automation, artificial intelligence and stay-at-home gratification. With an entire floor of robots that zip around on a grid moving groceries, it also heralds a new genre of architecture: ‘lights-out factories’, where buildings are not designed for humans at all. (It was for this reason that its 2019 fire was so difficult to put out.) While our descendants might snicker at its quaint tech, the decisive role it will play in automating away our nation of shopkeepers alone will be worth memorialising.
Rod Liddle
That addled old hag rock music managed to cough up very few gobbets this century. What we have heard is instead a gradually declining death rattle, much of it from people – Neil Young, Bob Dylan – who are themselves knocking on heaven’s door. Nothing has had me gripped as it did even in the 1990s. Yuck made one brilliant album, with its feet planted in 1992 and then disappeared. Conor Oberst threatened to be interesting, so too the Drive-By Truckers. But even then I struggled to enthuse. So let my nomination be for glistening, dull, corporate electropop and EDM, which dominates everything, and give my award, a bowl of cold chicken livers, to Swedish auteur Max Martin. Thanks so much, Max.
Lucy Vickery
Betroffenheit, a brave, raw hybrid of theatre and dance by the actor and writer Jonathon Young and the choreographer Crystal Pite, stayed with me for longer than anything else I have seen this century. The seed for the work was a shocking real-life tragedy. In 2009 Young lost his teenage daughter, niece and nephew in a cabin fire while the family was on holiday.
Pite’s genre-bending choreography is layered with Young’s spoken text and performance to create a visceral, immersive experience that explores what it is like to survive a catastrophic event: the state of shock and bewilderment that engulfs a person; how we keep responding to trauma long after it has passed. Rooms morph and collapse like memories; sound repeats and distorts like compulsive thoughts; lights isolate and expose, mimicking moments of clarity and panic. Betroffenheit expands the language of dance and theatre to express what it means to live inside trauma and offers a path not out of grief but through it.
Curtis Yarvin
Margaret is about the great vice of our time: narcissism, the need to live as the main character in a dramatic narrative. Everyone in the social-media age is a bit of a narcissist – and anyone who can’t see it in themselves is a full-blown case. Watch Margaret (see the original three-hour director’s cut that was in Hollywood limbo for eight years till Scorsese came in and edited the theatrical release) on a date, and watch them squirm as the main character’s pretences are brutally destroyed – or if they don’t squirm, run for the hills.
J.J. Charlesworth
A multiscreen kaleidoscope of sumptuous black-and-white video projection, Isaac Julien’s masterpiece Once Again… (Statues Never Die), 2022, is a work of its moment, in part preoccupied with colonialism and empire and the history of the ethnographic museum, the ‘statue wars’. But it expands into an astounding visual essay about race, history and art, its central figure that of Alain Locke, art critic and pivotal figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Criss-crossing the old and the new world, mixing arguments over politics and aesthetics, of ancestry and modernity, and how the future can be freed from the shackles of the past, it’s a cinematic and intellectual tour-de-force. A video work that should be on permanent display at the Tate or the National Gallery.
Tanjil Rashid
Nothing produced in the 21st century deserves this accolade. I am withholding gold and silver, but at a push, third prize might go to the video game Age of Empires II: The Definitive Edition (Xbox Studios, 2019), which gives a fittingly interactive form to history’s bloody return in this, the third and final millennium of the common era. If you want to envision ecological apocalypse, genocidal settler-colonialism, or the collapse of civilisational norms, put away your Spengler and play a ten-hour death match. Losing to the always insuperable AI-marshalled barbarians at the gates offers a catharsis more apposite to our present condition than the finest Greek tragedies.
Rowan Williams
Antony Gormley seems to me to be one of the authoritative presences in contemporary sculpture; and although it’s hard to choose one from a plethora of outstanding work, I’d go for ‘Transport’ (2011) in Canterbury Cathedral, a figure suspended in the air, constructed with nails from some of the mediaeval roof beams. Precarious, shifting with the air currents as people walk underneath, not quite solid, not quite transparent, monumental and exposed all at once in Gormley’s characteristic way.
Digby Warde-Aldam
If we’re looking for a totemic cultural achievement not only from the 21st century, but absolutely, archetypally of it, I can’t think of anything more representative than Grand Theft Auto III: Vice City (2002). Set in a convincing facsimile of 1980s Miami, the game was cinematic in scope, ironic in tone and staggeringly successful; and art or not, it was most definitely a phenomenon. Its portrayals of ultra-violent carjacking and ethnic gang warfare inspired a moral panic, while its Scarface aesthetics and retro soundtrack single-handedly catalysed an 1980s revival that lasted way longer than the decade it fetishised. It was supposedly a lot of fun, though I wouldn’t know: I don’t like video games and I certainly don’t play them.
Philip Clark
Illness prevented the pianist John Tilbury from playing AMM’s farewell performance so he sent along a recording made at home. This coda – a 13-minute piano improvisation that was included in the CD of that final gig, Last Calls – is for me the greatest art of the 21st century. AMM was a pioneer of British free improvisation, their music generating itself out of glacially evolving layers of sound. There can of course be no ‘great art’ made by rewarming the expressive gestures of the past, and AMM’s music – no matter how dense and tangled it became – always seemed to start again from point zero each performance. Tilbury’s improvisation embraced the entirety of AMM’s history, while its crumbling textures and delicate, finespun fingerwork – Tilbury loves Thelonious Monk and Clifford Curzon – passed the baton to the next generation: up to you to put these fragments together again as you see fit.
James Walton
It’s been such an overwhelmingly rich and utterly transformative 25 years for television (Netflix’s first original show wasn’t until 2013) that it’s hard to know where to begin. But, if it’s not cheating, how about in 1999 when The Sopranos first appeared? Luckily for my purposes here, it continued well into the century, leading the way for any number of unfailingly intelligent yet thrilling dramas – The West Wing, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Succession, etc. – none of which ever quite surpassed it. When it comes to comedy, avoiding the phrase ‘Golden Age’ is equally tricky, what with – among many others – Peep Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Catastrophe and The Thick of It. Still, if I had to pick just one sitcom, it would be a show that doesn’t seem to have caught on as much as it should in Britain, but that no one should miss: Tina Fey’s 30 Rock.
Daisy Dunn
Bill Viola, who died last year aged 73, was known as ‘the Rembrandt of the video age’. He captured the spirit of the old masters in mesmerising assemblages of moving image and sound. Don’t knock video art until you’ve seen his. It says something that his ‘Martyrs’ and ‘Mary’ won a place in St Paul’s Cathedral. I might have chosen any one of his series or works – ‘Tristan’s Ascension’ gives a flavour of his power – but ‘The Passions’ is especially arresting. No one else has resurrected and propelled the past into the 21st century with quite so much emotion.
Rupert Christiansen
Nothing I’ve seen, heard or read about mass migration – surely the most urgent crisis of our era – has hit me quite so viscerally as Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern, a dance work of about half an hour, set to an extract from Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and first performed by the Royal Ballet in 2017. What its choreographic imagery suggests so powerfully is that there are two ways of confronting this terrifying phenomenon: as a matter of a mass of faceless, nameless creatures swarming like a murmuration of starlings or a plague of locusts without any apparent purpose or destination; or as the tragedies of individual human beings and families, driven by fear and frustration, denied any voice or agency, escaping different histories of misery, desperate only to survive. Are they just them, or are they also us? Pite’s poetry of movement transcends words, arguments, statistics, the calculus of rights and wrongs.
Ismene Brown
Merce Cunningham’s Biped (Barbican, 2000) – a hallucinatory fusion of real and unreal dancers – may have been the greatest dance work I’ve seen this century, but it was created in 1999. Pam Tanowitz’s sublime Four Quartets (Barbican, 2019, and another New York creation) meditated on T.S. Eliot’s poetry with similarly otherworldly profundity. She focused purely on Eliot’s rich images with translucent imagery of her own, circling around his extraordinary insight – ‘At the still point, there the dance is.’ A Desert Island experience.
Meanwhile, Sylvie Guillem emerged as the most thrilling and disruptive exemplar of the classical ballerina tradition since Anna Pavlova. Having set a stratospheric new classical look, owed, yes, to natural advantages, but above all to her matchless work ethic, Mademoiselle Non said ‘non’ to classicism – but as a stimulus. In 2003 she lobbed a grenade into the Royal Ballet with the heartstoppingly risky modern trio Broken Fall, made by Russell Maliphant for her and the BalletBoyz; suddenly ballet fell into the ‘heritage’ drawer, and still no one knows what to do with it.
Michael Hann
The unveiling this century of Sir Tom Jones as a serious artist is a marvel – and something that has never before been seen in pop. His four albums of the past 15 years – all produced by Ethan Johns – have been grave, late-life masterpieces that rival the similar trajectories of Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, neither of whom had to shake off associations with cabaret and knicker-throwing to be taken seriously. Here you can find Jones revisiting his roots, as well as trying to work out his place in the world as the light grows dim. The best art of the 21st century? Of course not. But the most surprising and delightful? Perhaps.
Christopher Howse
I can’t think of any music, painting, film or building from this century that I rate highly.
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