Last year around this time, the global economy fell off a cliff; then, days later, Damien Hirst sold $200 million worth of paintings. Things were strange then, and it’s been a wild ride since. With a new art season opening amid continued uncertainty about, well, pretty much everything, we decided to see what artists and curators had on their minds.

It’s never easy to fashion questions for such things, and plenty were jettisoned for being (1) irrelevant; (2) ludicrous; (3) tedious; and (4) a toxic brew of 1-3. In the end, we went with those below; to mull it further would have distracted us from more important things, like Glenn Beck. Their intentional vagueness opened the door for silliness; some respondents, to their credit, waltzed right in. And so, as a gauge of the state of the art world, this is pretty offbeat in parts; as an overall reading experience, it will, we hope, amuse. What more can one ask for, really?

The final question was the requisite recession plug. You know, lest we forget it exists and start skipping through the streets in a state of mindless glee, throwing cash at things. We opted to phrase it playfully — “Is there anything left to say about the recession?” — as though it were just another topic that had been talked to death and become wearisome, like “birthers,” or gladiator sandals, or Michael Jackson.

The suggestion was made at one point that we address the recession by merely asking, “Are you scared?” In retrospect, we wish we’d done so. In retrospect, perhaps that should have been the questionnaire’s only question. It might have resulted in something bracingly honest, something less poll-like and more like a passage of pithy, Beckett-esque dialogue, or stark, language-based conceptual art:

Q: Are you scared?

A: Are you?

Q: Yes.

At left, a list of our respondents; below, their responses. Here, we hand over the mic to Dushko Petrovich and Roger White, publishers of the art journal Paper Monument, who know a bit about questionnaires, having just compiled a collection of them into the lively and informative pamphlet “I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette.”

 
What will be the most talked about show this season?

Sara Greenberger Rafferty: The Magical Elves/Sarah Jessica Parkers Untitled Art Project TV show.

Deborah Kass: The Whitney Biennial. Isn’t it always?

Nato Thompson: Probably something uninteresting, like a painting show that shows that painting isn’t really dead or a show that reductively sets out to prove that beauty is still an important term or that youth culture is still exciting. The most talked about shows tend to be the ones that discuss the same old tropes.

Jens Hoffman: Any show that makes people think, laugh, and feel good about themselves.

Melissa Chiu: Urs Fischer at New Museum.

Lisa Anne Auerbach: The health care debate.

 
What are you most looking forward to this season?

Erin Shirreff: Anthony Pearson at Marianne Boesky, Roni Horn at the Whitney, Mark Manders at Tanya Bonakdar, and Paul Sietsma at MoMA.

DK: Ree Morton at the Drawing Center, Georgia O’Keeffe at the Whitney, Sylvia Sleigh at I-20, Robert Frank at the Met.

NT: The folks I respect (qualifier) will be talking about the Istanbul Biennial curated by What, How and for Whom.

Deborah Cullen: The Marina Abramovic retrospective at MoMA should be powerful and moving.

JH: Great art.

MC: The Arshile Gorky retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

LAA: R. Crumbs "Book of Genesis" at the Hammer, "New Topographics" at LACMA.

 
Best emerging trend:

DK: Facebook

NT: Slow practices. Enough with artists doing projects, but instead ways of being in the world.

DC: Small-scale or single-piece shows. Lower prices and limited budgets allow for a greater democratization again of the art world.

JH: Exhibitions with humor.

MC: Korean photographers. See “Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean photography,” opening at MFA Houston Oct. 18.

LAA: Content.

 
Worst emerging trend:

DK: Facebook.

NT: Craptacular sculpture.

DC: Digital art.

JH: Exhibitions without humor.

Robert Storr: Misconceptualism. It’s spreading everywhere among the half-smart and the semi-educated — like black mold — proving that a little knowledge really is a dangerous thing.

MC: Museum deaccessioning for purposes other than refining the collection.

LAA: Abstraction.

 
The art world would be a far better place if ….

DK: ... it was more of community — and less of a country club — where ideas were valued more than money.

NT: ... there were more opportunities to showcase noncommercial, social-based projects that were actually working toward radical social change.

JH: ... curators were not asked to answer questions like these.

RS: ... everybody developed “outside” interests that couldn’t be turned into “inside” games. Then we’d all have something to talk about besides “career.” For example:

- birdwatching — like Barnet Newman and Alfred Barr

- pétanque — like San Francisco conceptualist Paul Koss (I’m following suit in my local bocci court in Carroll Gardens)

- gardening — like painter Robert Dash in Hamptons potato fields long before the art world arrived, and filmmaker Derek Jarman on the stony coast of England

- knife making — like Bruce Nauman

- and horseback riding — like Bruce Nauman.

MC: ... New York were closer to Asia.

LAA: ... all the Priuses were traded in for bicycles.

 
Who is overdue for a museum retrospective?

DK: Pat Steir, Joan Jonas, Frank Stella (again).

NT: Group Material.

DC: Rafael Ferrer, who will be featured in his first retrospective in June 2010 at El Museo del Barrio. This Puerto Rican mischief-maker has been producing astonishing work since the ’50s — we’ll recall his leaf-bombs of Leo Castelli Gallery in 1968 right up through his large-scale, tropical-sinister paintings of the 1990s.

RS: Well, it mostly depends on where, since retrospectives large and small are everywhere but often in out of the way places. Those who deserve major attention at a main venue include Robert Mangold, Susan Rothenberg, Giovanni Anselmo, Nancy Spero (in her hometown, New York), Louise Lawler, Alex Katz (a concise but comprehensive overview in a major New York museum). And also Al Held, Jörg Immendoff (in America), Jiro Yoshihara, Robert Barry ... and more.

MC: Xu Bing

LAA: James Benning.

 
Overrated?

DK: Men, youth, gossip, the glamorous mystique of the unregulated art market.

NT: Anti-intellectual, consumer-friendly art criticism.

JH: Money.

RS: Damien Hirst, of course. After all, who in the world wants to tailgate Russian oligarchs on their way to bankruptcy? Let’s just change the channel, and if he has the staying power, we can tune in next season to see what the new gimmick is and if it is diverting or just more of the same product rollout. Somehow Jeff Koons remains mesmerizing, even if you’ve seen his act a dozen times. Damien Hirst wears himself out trying to displease. Although he is as much of a worker as Warhol, Koons, like Warhol, displeases without breaking a sweat.

LAA: Propofol.

 
Underrated:

DK: Women, grown-ups, wisdom, the intersection of New York School painting and feminism starting in the ’70s.

NT: Temporary Services and Ultra Red.

JH: Money.

RS: The list is too long, but it is mostly composed of people whose work I find myself looking at after the gallery-grazers have moved on.

LAA: A good night’s sleep.

 
Is there anything left to say about the recession?

DK: As is the case with all recessions, this one should be good for reevaluating women artists. This time, with any luck, it will be painters, the last frontier.

NT: There is much to say. Being poor is hard on people. Contrary to the popular thought that many nonprofits need to go away, the recession actually will further destroy the limited platforms for noncommercial-based practices.

JH: A recession is a terrible thing to waste.

RS: Yes, even new bubbles will not alter the basic facts that too much fast money was indiscriminately chasing too much fast art. But we cannot count on patrons or artists with no sense of proportion to provide the corrective over the long haul. Only creative self-discipline, tough-minded criticism, and curatorial rigor can do that. Now’s the time to see who has such capacities.

LAA: I didn’t have much to say about it in the first place.

Read Dushko Petrovich and Roger White's responses here.