Museums are the main, if not the only, place where the average New Yorker — and certainly most tourists — see visual art. If you scan the fall 2008 museum lineup for New York, you will see a few crowd-pleasing exhibitions to be sure, but there is also some extraordinarily challenging work going on view. Not that these shows won’t draw throngs, but as Sarah Douglas noted about the touring Gilbert & George retrospective in her blog, The Appraisal, these aren’t necessarily kid-friendly — or even tourist-friendly — fare. My top five picks will have you traveling from Manhattan to Queens to Brooklyn in search of brain food.

1. Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) at the Museum of Modern Art, November 19, 2008 – February 2, 2009

I haven’t seen anything by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist that matched the sheer wow factor of her first solo show at Luhring Augustine in 2000, but she’s held her title as the reigning queen of video installation art by continuing to produce lush works of a personal, alluring nature. Her project at MoMA’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium promises 25-foot-high moving images and sculpted seating islands designed by the artist.

2. Martin Ramirez: The Last Works at the American Folk Art Museum, October 7, 2008 – April 12, 2009

For Martin Ramirez, confinement in the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California, for the last 15 years of his life had the unexpected effect of facilitating an exceptionally fruitful artistic practice. As sad as the tale of his imprisonment is — the Mexican-born artist was sent to a mental hospital in California in 1931 and diagnosed as a “catatonic schizophrenic,” a label some say was a convenient way to handle a homeless immigrant who couldn’t speak English — it led to the creation of hundreds of beautifully designed, expressive drawings and collages that show a unique vision. This show features 25 pieces from a newly discovered cache of 120 works on paper.

3. Art and China’s Revolution at the Asia Society, September 5, 2008 – January 11, 2009

I’m gleefully looking forward to this exhibition, which includes kitschy propaganda graphics and Chinese socialist realist painting, among other documentation from the three decades following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. “Art for the people” may not have been good politics, but it did create some outstanding visuals. Alongside the regime-approved paintings depicting peasants, workers, and soldiers are nonconforming “black paintings” — work deemed by the government to be unfit for viewing in modern China’s answer to the Nazis’ campaign against “Degenerate Art.” Also included in the exhibition are sections devoted to the history of the period, the impact of government-led “reeducation” on leading contemporary artists, and the relationship between revolutionary art and current artistic practices.

4. Martin Boyce and Ugo Rondinone: We Burn, We Shiver. at the SculptureCenter, September 7 – November 30, 2008

Swiss-born, New York-based Ugo Rondinone’s solo show “Big Mind Sky” at Matthew Marks, featuring nine-foot-tall sculptures resembling primitive clay monster masks, was one of last year’s standout gallery shows. Now Rondinone is poised to appear with Glasgow-based sculptor Martin Boyce in a display of tangible fantasy hosted by the SculptureCenter in Queens. Boyce is set to create a 40-by-50-foot spider web from standard fluorescent light fixtures, shifting the scale and material of a natural form, while Rondinone has cast objects, including a river rock and a fireplace, in bronze, in a further attempt to turn the familiar on its head. These newly commissioned works might not be as goofily delicious as Rondinone’s masks, but they’re definitely worth the trip. And while you’re in Queens head over to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and make a day of it.

5. Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum, October 3, 2008 – January 11, 2009

I caught a substantial Gilbert & George show at Tate Liverpool in 1993, and I look forward to seeing the first retrospective in 20 years of their larger-than-life, slickly produced, performative photo collages. (The show debuted last year at Tate Modern, co-organized with the Brooklyn Museum.) Everything the duo has done in their 40-plus-year career, even their student work, is classic, from their Singing Sculpture (1968) —  in which they lip-synched and danced to a recording of the English music hall song “Underneath the Arches” while covered in metallic paint — to their “Naked Shit Pictures” series from 1995, which features photographs of their own excrement, predating by more than a decade Andres Serranos photographs of fecal matter that recently opened at Yvon Lambert in New York.