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 Parker’s 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. Crumb’s "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.