The 40 creators featured here—most of whom are not celebrated stars—offer a thoughtful sense of where the arts are headed. They’re innovative, edgy, and of the moment—but they’re not mere flavors-of-the-month. They’ve all got a depth, resonance, and soulfulness that make them good companions on the journey toward a better world. And their work is full of ideas and insights that challenge us to live more fully, see more clearly, and have more fun. —The Editors

Tom Waits
Black Rider/Blue Valentine
Remember when you first heard a Tom Waits song? You were having a clumsy affair with a blackjack dealer from Reno who swigged peppermint schnapps and lived in a rooming house with a jukebox in the hall . . .
And if you weren?t, you should have been. That?s the way it is with Waits; he?s a storyteller, and he turns you into one, too. And he keeps you guessing. From Small Change and Blue Valentine to Black Rider and Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill, the beatnik-flavored cult hero?s remarkable songwriting and ever-changing musical directions have kept his devoted fans delightfully off balance now for more than a quarter century. His latest works, Blood Money and Alice, are both 10-year-old sound tracks to theatrical works by avant-garde director Robert Wilson that have found their way into album form. Why? Don?t ask Waits. ?I could tell you anything,? he told The Onion in a recent interview. ??Helen Keller made an appearance in the last tune, and it?s sung by her mother.? . . . Your mind will make sense of anything.? Blood Money and Alice (both Epitaph)
—CRAIG COX

Mariko Mori Digital Diva
Mariko Mori can see the future, and it is digital, spiritual, and wearing a miniskirt. This 35-year-old Japanese performance and media artist creates installation pieces and computer-altered self-portraits that have a lot of fun exploring serious themes. A former model and student of fashion design, Mori has a perky, insouciant, yet somehow oddly reverent way of treating religious images. Viewers of her 1997 video Nirvana wear 3-D glasses and watch as a ball of flame, and then the image of Mori herself, dressed as a Japanese deity, descend from the screen and out into the gallery space. Floating overhead, Mori chants a tuneless song while a gaggle of animated characters accompany her on assorted musical instruments. Simultaneously gorgeous and silly, Nirvana finds weight and meaning in its echoes of religious ritual and its reference to the art of Japan?s Heian period (794?1185 CE).
Another work, Birth of a Star, finds Mori gussied up in a plastic miniskirt and giant, techno-blasting headphones that seem to be fused to her head. As she bops along, her vacant smile and glazed eyes reveal a whole new creature, unique to the 21st century; she becomes, as British art critic Richard Dorment puts it, ?a human being . . . whose perception of reality has been permanently altered by machines.? Mori?s comment here is on the inner life of humans in a high-tech age. Is a synthetic inner reality, achieved through the pulsing noise of techno music, really all that different from a state of bliss brought on by rhythmic chants of ?om??
Ambiguities like these make Mori?s work compelling. Hers is a strange new world of high fashion, soul searching, bodhisattvas, and levitating, bongo-playing animals. Going there with her is both delightful and disquieting.
www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/mori_mariko.html
—LAINE BERGESON