Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum

Partners in art and life since the late 1960s, Gilbert & George make huge photomontages, but they prefer to be called "sculptors." Indeed, their whole shtick is based around the idea that Life Is Art and they themselves are "living sculptures." They're so connected to each other and to this philosophy that they prefer to be called an "artist," as in "the artist Gilbert & George."

To their fans, G&G are queer heroes partly responsible for keeping figurative art alive during times of conceptualism and abstraction; to their detractors, the drawings and photographs do nothing so much as overwhelm and disgust, a complaint that sounds too prim to be taken seriously until you check out some of their close-ups of fecal matter or juvenile depictions of ejaculating penises. We admire their honesty; after all, what human isn’t so fascinated with his or her own minutiae, to the point of believing, consciously or unconsciously, that every action, bodily function, thought, wrinkle, gesture, sexual partner, and/or behavior is worthy of display on the white walls of a museum?