Best art gallery
You're walking down Cambridge Street on a recent evening in Inman Square. You see a bundle of people congregating outside a doorway. There's no defining the crowd: it's young, it's old, it's spiky-haired, it's ponytailed, it's hip, it's hippie, it's geeky, sleek, artsy, abnormal, and mainstream (whatever that means). Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd, so you stroll a little closer. You peer in the windows, through the door. There's something going on in there. It's experimental improvisational jazz. It's a girl with a guitar. It's a subversive slide show of someone's revolutionary road trip. It's two guys playing on the same piano. It's political performance art - anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-authoritarian. It's an independent-magazine brigade teaching people how to create their own 'zines. It's art assaulting all your senses. It's the Zeitgeist Gallery, Phoenix readers' consistent pick for the best gallery in the city. Art on the walls is only the beginning.

The Institute of Contemporary Art earns the best-gallery honor this year, as it did in 2003, but we're willing to wager that the term "gallery" won't apply to the ICA once it settles into its new space on Boston's waterfront. The groundbreaking on the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building took place back in September, and the projected opening date falls sometime in 2006, when we predict it'll be elevated to museum status. The information on the new space suggests the same: "The ICA is the first art museum to be built in Boston for almost 100 years." The grand scale of the thing, the über-contemporary angles, the technology, and the location will surely enhance what the ICA already does successfully: showcase some of the most thought-provoking visual art created today, from the Boris Mikhailov retrospective to the upcoming "Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists."

Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, (617) 876-6060, www.zeitgeist-gallery.org; Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street, Boston, (617) 266-5152, www.icaboston.org.