It’s been a long, hard decade: financial crises, terrorism, Facebook stalking, skinny jeans, global warming, and Dan Brown novels. What we need now – what everyone needs – is closure. Emotionally, the Legend can’t provide that – it’s only a newspaper. But if we can’t be therapists, we can definitely be tastemakers. What follows is our list of notable artistic achievements 2000-2009: a concise wrap-up of what was good (or at least what we liked) this decade.

“The Moon and Antarctica” wasn’t the best album released in 2000. Its 2004 re-release wasn’t the best album of 2004. In album-length doses, Isaac Brock’s voice makes me feel like dying, and not in a slow, Kurt Vonnegut-chain-smoking-Pall Malls kind of way. But his anthemic “gotta see, gotta know right now” marks a perfect start for a new decade, violently unique and completely inimitable in its tone and timbre. The distorted dozen guitar tracks layered on at the start are the product of an imagination run wild; the last “it all will fall, fall right into place” is an augury.

Michael Chabon is special, and no two ways about it. Sometimes his writing is tear-jerkingly poetic (“A Yiddish Pale Fire”); sometimes it’s vast, epic, fantastic yet overwrought (“Summerland”); sometimes it’s just obnoxious (“Werewolves in their Youth”). But this novel’s tale of the American dream and the superhero industry – one and the same – won its 2001 Pulitzer for good reason. In terms of craft, story, character and, structure, it might be matched, but not surpassed;: the year that “Kavalier & Clay” came out, I also read “Catcher in the Rye” for the first time. I liked “Kavalier and Clay” better. I still do.

Persepolis deserves two mentions on this list: one for the four-part graphic novel which was first published in English two decades after the girlhood and the revolution it retells, and another for the delightful and unconventional animated feature made from it several years later. More than anything, the book is simple; clean lines, compelling authenticity and honesty, and an unadornedly confessional style make every page sing out.

With every Wes Anderson movie I watch, his precious way of tying loose ends together appeals to me a little less. But with “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Anderson struck gold, bringing to his cutesy, just-so filmmaking some genuine emotional substance. Endearing quirks become a little scary, amplify to the point of madness, take on elements of tragedy. The Royal Tenebaums is genius.

If “The Royal Tenenbaums” is a work of bright-eyed artistic whimsy, the Strokes’ “Is This It” is the product of machine-like, calculated brilliance: eight hours of band practice every day from 1998 to 2001, bringing to garage rock the kind of expertise usually reserved for string quartets. Julian Casablancas would write and arrange a track only if its melody stuck in his head; he exerted complete creative control over his band, and waited for success to come to him rather than chasing it down. It came. Every track on this album is memorable. Some are phenomenal.

Wilco came into its own with 1999’s Summerteeth. In 2002, after firing bandmates and spiraling into a haze of drug abuse, Jeff Tweedy and his band produced an album nobody wanted to release. That album was “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” less country, less pop, so experimental as to be ethereal in the way of a memory set to music. Its viscerally experimental production speaks to the band’s new approach; the sparse, wounded-sounding vocals are a perfect complement the heartbroken spirit that permeates the record. Nonesuch Records, Wilco’s label, quickly realized its mistake.

2002 was a great year for sad people. Beck’s “Sea Change” took aural inspiration from Blood on the Tracks and Serge Gainsbourg’s “Histoire de Melody Nelson,” and sounds much like Blood on the Tracks’ desolate guitars would if Bob Dylan could sing and arrange for an orchestra. Its lush sound is often at odds with “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” – but it is equally moving, honest, simple and direct in its writing. A real work of art.

This movie is one unbroken hour-and-a-half long shot which moves through a living museum of Russian history. The entire movie is one ninety-minute Steadicam shot. We travel in first person through the museum, curated by a Russian ghost, watching actors in period costume re-enact significant historical events. There is no plot in the traditional sense; rather, the film chronicles Russian history era by era, the scenes coming one by one to vividly enacted life.

Every decade has one good romantic comedy.  In the 60s it was “Charade;” in the 80s it was “Gregory’s Girl;” in the 90s it was “Titanic.” It’s easy to make fun of the cutesy absurdity that is “Love Actually.” It’s also easy to watch Hugh Grant dance down a staircase to “Jump (For Your Love)” 65 times. I have done both these things and I have no regrets.

There is something incredibly compelling in the very structure of this book, in the chapters marked by prime numbers, in the wayward storytelling; it transcends children’s literature. The protagonist is completely relatable despite his quirks, despite his Asperger’s syndrome, despite his violently idiosyncratic approach to life – so much so that I questioned whether it was fiction. His story of a murdered dog, ultimately trivial, takes place inside a mind which is anything but.

Alan Bennett wrote a stage play about growing up British, brilliant and confused about your future, your sexuality, your faith and your identity in the 1980s. The script is witty, often poignant, concise in some places and florid in others; he brings his students and teachers to life with real artistry. This was the best new stage play I’ve seen performed. The movie, made two years later, holds up well: the cinematography is never particularly inventive, but it feels like a simply staged and truthfully presented version of the original play.

This is a six-hundred-foot London skyscraper which looks like a giant pickle. It is a miracle of architecture. If it was gaudier, it would resemble a Fabergé egg. Of all this decade’s significant buildings it is the most striking: so unusual it looks almost natural, unusual without being weird, without the overwrought artificiality of a building like Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. In fifty years’ time, amid dozens of new buildings, the Gherkin will look utterly at home.

“Declaration of Independence Myth #2: John Hancock signed the Declaration extra-large ‘so King George would be able to read it.’ False: John Hancock was in fact 23 feet tall, and merely signed in his usual fashion.” The best decision the Daily Show’s writers ever made was to write a mock civics textbook, sending up Supreme Court overreach, Congressional mishap, Presidential foolishness. “Have your students hold a mock election,” they advise. “Can’t stage a mock election? Just mock a real election.”

Out with the Strokes and in with good old-fashioned rock and roll. If Is This It was a breath of fresh air, “Aha Shake Heartbreak” is a little more raw, a little wicked, not quite as artfully composed or arranged; where Is This It spent hours in the mirror getting impeccably disheveled this record didn’t care enough to dress up but looks good anyway. It’s a fast, bright-eyed, bruised and cocksure album with just enough of a Southern touch to be excitingly different. The first half of this decade was the domain of the new garage rockers, and this is one of its milestones.

Like Wes Anderson, Sufjan Stevens spends a lot of time wrapped up in a wispy, ethereal fantasyland where everything is just really great all the time and it’s all so moving that he needs to cry. Also like Wes Anderson, Sufjan really hits the nail on the head sometimes. Illinois was one of those times – a concept album about the state of Illinois and its history and characters from Lincoln to John Wayne Gacy. When it came out, this album was lauded maybe a little more than it deserved – but maybe just as much as it should have been. After five years, it certainly stands up to more listening.

MAKE is a second home on paper for every DIY-er, a magazine filling a gap – better late than never – in the lives of everyone who spends quality time with hammers and nails and power-saws. MAKE is for anyone who has ever wanted to make anything, ever, full of illustrated guided and step-by-step pictorials for how to make cigar-box guitars and baking soda bottle rockets.

“Friday Night Lights” is essentially “Dawson’s Creek,” set in West Texas, with a focus on high-school football and its accompanying drama. It’s genius. The acting is the best on network television, and the writing among the sharpest. The show is only cliché and overwrought when being in high school is cliché and overwrought; yet its mixture of unironic excitement about high school sports and unselfconscious emotionality – which thankfully never descends into melodrama – haven’t brought it the recognition it deserves. But the show, now in its fourth season, with improvised scenes in every episode and enormous freedom for actors to revise dialogue, still makes for television as atypical and as unprepossessingly fun as it was in its first year.

“Zidane” is a documentary about soccer star Zinedine Zidane, on one day, during one match, in real time, from 17 camera angles. Why does it work? Why is the cinematography perfect, the story clearly present and compelling even though it’s just a soccer match like any other? Because this movie is a biography, a phenomenally atypical one. It is a psychological profile, a life story in two hours, a portrait of a man who is soccer. I don’t care about soccer, but I love this movie. Zidane the man is a quiet enigma, brooding, a soccer machine. But he is far from peaceful: Toward the end of the 2005 match, as in the 2006 World Cup a year later, Zidane is sent off for fighting, and we see him fight as self-assuredly and unhesitatingly as he makes any other move on the field. The insight that his actions, and this film, provide into the most basic parts of human nature are unshakable and chilling; this is a perfectly executed snapshot.

Even if you don’t think “The National” is one of the most musically rich acts of the last 10 years, which they are, it’s hard to not step back and admire the fragile but insistent melodies of “Boxer.” Matt Berninger’s baritone, filtered through mighty doses of black coffee, bourbon and nicotine, tugs at the heartstrings through every single one of the melancholy anthems on this record. The tone is reflective, mournful, mature, with an eye to learning from loss; it moves seamlessly from personal introspection to muted political commentary. The Obama campaign, in fact, used two of its lead singles – primarily the sleeper hit “Fake Empire” – in various prominent spots during the lead-up to the 2008 election.

A second mention for “Persepolis” – this time, the movie – because the novel and the film adaptation are two radically different works of art. “Up” was fine. “Wall-E” was great. But the animated feature film needed a breath of fresh air, and along came “Persepolis” like a nice Italian roast in a world of instant coffee.

A.J. Jacobs, a staff writer for Esquire magazine, decided to obey every single biblical commandment for a year. If nothing else — if not for its unabashed silliness — read this book for the scene where, in line with Deuteronomy 22:23, he tries to stone an adulterer. With pebbles. In Central Park. Jerry Falwell would have been proud.

HBO produced this seven-part miniseries, an American answer to the uncountable BBC period dramas and Merchant Ivory films, which are on PBS every minute of every day. Paul Giamatti’s understated but forceful performance as the title character, along with its subtle but trenchant commentary on the death of classical statesmanship, won it a total of 13 Emmys – more than any other miniseries. Finally, someone recognizes quality.

I can’t explain why no one has heard of this movie. The actors are A-list. The premise – a charismatic and haunted Holocaust survivor in 1960s Israel has the run of a mental hospital where he is ostensibly a patient – is captivating. But it was never in wide release. I saw it by mistake in a tiny theater in Chelsea where I had gone to see “Burn After Reading” – when I showed up late, “Adam Resurrected” was my only option. At the very least, with its first-rate acting, this is the finest of the many Israeli and handful of German movies I’ve seen. The cinematography, with its sweeping opening shots of the Negev Desert and dark, claustrophobic concentration-camp flashbacks, is some of the best from any country. Between that and the relentlessly bleak atmosphere, it is both the perfect arthouse film and the worst date movie ever.

This is a Great Work of fiction, destined for the canon in a few decades’ time. “Netherland” is cathartic in its exploration of New York City, post-September 11. Refreshing in its unadorned prose, it is anything but a happy book. It is an honest book about a sad time, rarely easy to read, but always stark and unforgiving in its observation. It is cold and sharp throughout, frustrated and intermittently frustrating, dry and wry and cynical and keen-eyed and full of despair and the requisite ray of hope. It is one for the ages. It is New York’s primal scream, a cathartic attempt at re-alignment in a world spinning dizzyingly fast.

I know Lady Gaga is a person, and not, strictly speaking, art. But I’m convinced she’s the next Madonna, and I want to get that in writing so I can prove I said it first when everyone else is saying it in a few years. And her personality, taken as a whole, is definitely performance art; my mother thought her Golden Globes outfit was an homage to the Jetsons. As Madonna’s star fades – this was the decade she turned 50 – someone else is making catchy songs and capturing public attention. Conspicuous superficiality is alive and well.

“District 9” has the three essential components for cinematic success: aliens, fiery explosions, and gripping allegorical undertones underlining the devastating social impact of apartheid on present-day South African society. (“Invictus” only had one of these things, which is why it wasn’t as good.) To some extent, “D9” really is the so-called “smart blockbuster” it was typed as: fun and gripping, but with a message. There’s superb depth here, though, not just in that there’s a message but in the relatively low-budget yet visually and thematically convicing integration of aliens into our world, in the cinéma-vérité Handicam shots, in the improvised dialogue. Neill Blomkamp, its director, is one to watch.

“Moon” has no aliens. Nothing bursts into flames. It’s not even set in South Africa. But it’s set on the moon. From the posters to the trailers to its indie-darling star Sam Rockwell, “Moon” is militantly weird. Its clearest inspiration is Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” another creepy, atmospheric movie about strange things happening to a lonely guy in space. But “Moon” really isn’t comparable to most science fiction; it had me at the space clones. Now that Obama is cutting NASA’s space exploration budget, space clones may be our only hope. Escapist fantasy is a necessity in these economically trying times.

I wasn’t surprised at all when no 2009 album topped Neko Case’s “Middle Cyclone.” It holds up not only to the best music that year but the best music this decade – still little surprise, if you’ve heard it. This album of pop-sensible, rock-tinged alt-country music, and it is gorgeous from the opener, “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” to “Marais la Nuit,” the half hour of recorded night-time swamp noise that closes it out. As the crickets chirp and the frogs croak and the noise gently fades into nothingness, it’s easy to interpret it as a gentle close to the decade’s artistic achievements.