From the Arctic Monkeys to Facebook, from reality TV to WAGs, the decade from 2000 to 2009 will be one to remember.

There’s been the fall from grace of Labour, with Blair vilified and Brown even more so, the rise and demise of the Bush administration and the Obama-mania that followed. However, the War on Terror has been the defining feature of the decade’s politics: 9/11 shook the confidence of the Western world and kick-started the invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq War, and continues to dominate today’s papers.

Jostling for headline space was the credit crunch, which saw the bankruptcy of firms like Lehman Brothers, and the shrinking of many a fat banker’s wallet. The decade has also seen climate change become a major concern on the world’s agenda, with continuing pressure from environmental protesters met only by hazy promises from politicians.

The Noughties have also heralded the arrival of the  ‘Information Age’, with the globe linked up by the internet, mobile communications and social networking sites, creating a world where everyone is plugged in and switched on, 24/7.

To celebrate the sun going down on the first decade of the new millennium, we’ve sought out the decade’s best TV, music, fashion, books, film and art. It was a difficult task and there had to be some exclusions (sorry Crazy Frog), but if it shows one thing, it’s that the Noughties have been a brilliant decade for culture. Bring on the next ten.

MUSIC

Back in 2001, the sound of indie was that of 1979, where the guitars were spindly and the jeans skinny. The forefathers of the revival? The Strokes. Their marriage of scruffy looks and garage band sound to Julian Casablancas’ Upper East Side drawl on Is This It? produced such noughties classics like ‘Someday’ and ‘Last Nite’. Elsewhere, the debut of Canada’s Arcade Fire, Funeral, was a beautiful collection of folk-tinged anthems from the ten-plus strong collective. Despite the grief-stricken title, the frenetic urgency of ‘Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)’ and ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ shine through, making the album feel anything but funereal. And given Jack White’s penchant for side-projects, it’s almost possible to forget where he started. On 2003’s Elephant, the White Stripes found themselves fine-tuning their formula; anthemic blues, stripped down and amped up.

On this side of the Atlantic, this decade’s answer to Morrissey and Marr, Pete Doherty and Carl Barat, took their cues from The Strokes and added some English whimsy, amateurism and a fair dabble of crack to produce The Libertines’ seminal classic Up the Bracket.

Jay-Z may have had 99 problems but producing brilliant albums wasn’t one, with 2001’s The Blueprint and The Black Album in 2003. And remember Kanye West before he started interrupting country starlets? He had a career as a brilliant producer-cum-rapper; his inventive use of samples, dab hand at beat construction and lyrical ingenuity, not to mention his enormous ego, are all over his ‘College’ albums, though his first, The College Dropout, is perhaps the best example.

Radiohead’s best may have been 1997’s OK Computer, but the noughties found them pushing the envelope further: reflecting the rise of online availability of music, the band’s In Rainbows was initially sold only via their website, to mass success and acclaim. Another band of epic proportions produced their best album yet: Sigur Ros’s exquisite Takk... , featuring the Attenborough-friendly ‘Hoppípolla’, saw their cinematic soundscapes and ‘Hopelandic’ lyrics meet with universal love.

And lest we forget the pop of the decade: Beyonce, Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga all struck a chord in the 00s, though no-one quite captured the public imagination as much as Amy Winehouse. Before the drink, the drugs, the rehab, there was the music, and Back to Black still stands as Winehouse’s greatest moment, defining the 60s revivalist soul, imitated but never-bettered by so many.

There are so many more to mention: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kings of Leon, Daft Punk... the list goes on. So dust down your record collection and relive the best moments of the noughties; they’ve been a brilliant ten years.

FILM

The jury’s still out on Twilight, but the noughties more than made up for sparkly vampires with a mixed bag of notables and masterpieces. Sacha Baron Cohen took on the mantle of gross-out humour, with Borat and Bruno doing in real-life what South Park only dared to do in cartoons. Meanwhile, Judd Apatow churned out hits like Superbad and Knocked Up, featuring slobby protagonists and giving hope to geeks everywhere that social awkwardness and an addiction to weed could land you a beautiful girl (e.g. Katherine Heigl).

The action film evolved from steroid-addled Arnie vehicles into a sleeker, more morally ambiguous beast in the form of the Bourne trilogy and the rebooted Bond and Batman films. Punching people very hard won’t cut it anymore; protagonists have to plumb the depths of personal tragedy too. With the darker tone came a new way to film action, too – jerky cameras leapt across roofs and tumbled down stairwells with their heroes, and fights were intense, knock-out scenes edited for maximum brutality and speed.

Movies like The Lord of the Rings were characterised by sweeping visuals, grand scores and human (and hobbit) tragedy on an epic scale. Faithfully adapted by Peter Jackson, LoTR brought fanboy culture into the mainstream: no longer did fantasy or comic book geeks have to hide in the shadows (of the Internet). By the time Iron Man rolled around, Hollywood had finally realised the power of the geek, wooing them with special screenings and freebies - all the while stripmining the fantasy and comic book genres for new material, with questionable success (see: Fantastic 4).

More than anything else, our generation will be defined by the breakout indie movies of the decade. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lost in Translation, Donnie Darko (and most of Wes Anderson) all shared the same lo-fi aesthetic, with impeccable indie soundtracks, deadpan humour, and quirky visual surrealism – who can forget the Tenenbaums’ uniforms? And most important: a very 21st century ennui, best experienced through the eyes of teenagers or young adults yearning for something the world has yet to offer.

The noughties also saw the rise of the docu-drama. From healthcare in Sicko to climate change in An Inconvenient Truth, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine created a new thirst for creative agit-prop film-making that took on the big issues with urgency and occasional self-righteousness (we’re looking at you, Al Gore).

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became a surprise hit, smashing conventional wisdom that Western audiences were incapable of simultaneously reading subtitles and watching the screen. From City of God to Spirited Away, the decade finally saw the mainstream recognition of world cinema, and yielded several fruitful artistic collaborations between lesser-known international film directors and Hollywood – just think of Brad Pitt in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, or Ang Lee directing Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain.

TV

It’s been a good decade for the old idiot-box. Despite the ever-burgeoning proliferation of crap, the noughties also saw a lot of truly great TV, headed – inevitably, overwhelmingly – by The Wire. Enough ink has been spilt over this show to prevent us adding anything new here; suffice to say, those who haven’t yet immersed themselves in the Baltimore underworld are denying themselves one of the decade’s cultural peaks, in any medium. It was joined by a number of other high-quality American dramas, mostly from upmarket channels HBO and AMC: The Sopranos and Six Feet Under earlier in the decade, as well as the sumptuous, intelligent Mad Men.

British programming, on the other hand, found itself reduced to big-budget dramatisations of Victorian novels and quasi-historical rompfests (Rome, Desperate Romantics). Reality TV was where the money was. The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and I’m a Celebrity... have been keeping ITV afloat for years. Channel 4 gave us Big Brother complete with 24/7 coverage on E4, and The Apprentice gave us noughties catchphrase: “You’re fired!” What we excelled in was deadpan, often excruciating alternative comedy. Chris Morris and Steve Coogan paved the way in the 90s, but the genre was blown open by 2001’s The Office. Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant established a template of subtle, character-based brilliance which would never be bettered – although Peep Show and The Thick of It have tried their best. Towards the odder end of the scale we find The Mighty Boosh, a show that sends you slightly insane if you watch it too often, and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, a pitch-perfect horror spoof. The US also got in on the act with Arrested Development, a densely knitted family saga.

However, all these high points may come to nought when we come to consider the TV that’s defined our generation. Here we turn to glossy Yankee trash and home-grown daytime toss. In the former category we find The O.C., 24, Lost, Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City; in the latter category Countdown, Richard & Judy, and above all Deal or No Deal, the programme which tried to turn box-opening into an art form. True, there were some half-decent cartoons – Futurama, Family Guy, even late-period Simpsons – but ultimately our young lives were occupied by a string of programmes which set themselves low targets, and even then didn’t always achieve them. It was fun at the time.

BOOKS

When asked about contemporary fiction, writer Philip Roth said crankily, “I don’t think in 20 or 25 years people will read these things at all…there are just other things for people to do,” and his despair at modern life animates some of the decade’s most memorable books.

The decade’s most illustrious books were J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series; whatever your reservations about the adverb-heavy prose, her stories provided an escapism craved by children and adults alike. Similarly sensationalist was Dan Brown’s the Da Vinci Code, where the typical detective story was taken to the furthest extreme.

Readers unsatisfied with Potter could look back to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials for more imaginative pleasures. The Amber Spyglass (2002) brought the trilogy to its climax, threading a coming of age narrative through moral and theological discussion. But what was so uplifting in Pullman’s rationalist vision would infect one of the decade’s most notable pieces of non-fiction: Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Although nobody would doubt Dawkins’s skills as a scientist, he wound up causing more problems than he solved in his work. Writing with all the zeal of the evangelists he describes, Dawkins won 8.5 million readers by refusing to analyse religion on its own terms.

Less intellectually stimulating was the craze for celebrity memoirs, ghost-written by  jobbing fashion or entertainment journalists. Victoria Beckham, Jade Goody, Jordan et al. all shared their life story with the book-buying public. 

Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin excelled ethically and aesthetically, lighting up modern concerns about childhood through dilemmas of authorship and what it means to play out a fictional role. Better still were the exuberant, modernist debuts from Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer, whose novels White Teeth and Everything is Illuminated poignantly elaborate the nuances of ethnic identity. Indeed, on the evidence of such writing it is less likely that Roth’s prophecy will prove true than that, in 25 years’ time, Smith and Foer’s novels will be acknowledged as modern classics.

ART

The noughties was the decade that saw the golden promise of the 90s YBAs quite literally go up in smoke. In 2004 the Momart warehouse fire destroyed works by Tracey Emin, Michael Craig Martin and the Chapman Brothers - the bonfire to end all vanities.

For Damien Hirst it was the skull what did it. After two decades as the Emperor of Britart, in 2007 Hirst was finally exposed as having no clothes. The £50million diamond-encrusted skull entitled Beyond Belief debuted just as the Credit Crunch dawned.

The start of the noughties saw auction houses blissfully reporting record-breaking sales. In 2006, a Jackson Pollock sold for $140m, the highest sum ever paid for a painting. By 2009, the good times were going, going gone. Credit-crunched Christie’s fired a quarter of its London staff, and Sotheby’s lost $28.2million on a single auction.

But it wasn’t all bad. The Tate Modern opened in 2000 and, along with the Gherkin, transformed London’s skyscape. By 2006, the former power station turned art gallery was London’s most visited tourist attraction. The Turbine Hall became the country’s most exciting venue for large scale art installations. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (the floating sun) and Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas (the giant trumpet) were triumphs. Over at Tate Britian, Chris Ofili embroiled himself in an insider trading scandal, undermining what was possibly the most beautiful installation of the decade: The Upper Room.

Other rotating installation spaces fared less well. The annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilion was reliably ugly and always, always leaked when it rained. The Fourth Plinth was predictably politically correct: Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant,  Ian Walters’ Nelson Mandela, but occasionally they got it right. Rachel Whiteread’s inverted plinth in perspex was a witty play on the plinth problem and Antony Gormley bowed the decade out with his epic One & Other.

Gormley’s Hayward exhibition was a virtuoso exercise in the sinister manipulation of space and the famous Blind Light inspired one of the decade’s most memorable political cartoons: Peter Brookes’ image of Gordon Brown stumbling hopelessly inside Gormley’s claustrophobic glass prison.

Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton made him one of the most recognisable artists of the decade and by way of Chinese counterfeiting, the most imitated. Also widely copied was illustrator David Shrigley whose influential fat black marker drawings spawned a thousand greeting card copyists. Grayson Perry was the decade’s Turner Prize hero. Dubbed the transvestite potter, his frocks and pots garnered interest in equal measure, and his long-running Times column offered the decade’s most intelligent and sensitive commentary on the art world.

The noughties was the decade of big bucks followed by big bust. Corporate sponsorship made the Royal Academy blockbusters possible, Unilever bankrolled the Turbine Hall and auction prices skyrocketed. Recessions are traditionally bad news for art. As for the next decade? My money’s on art schools. London’s broke.

STYLE

Almost every decade of fashion turned up: 20s fringing, 70s boho...  As ‘oh-it’s-vintage’ replaced ‘someone-died-in-that’ as the catchphrase for attic-chic, raiding the last century for your outfit became de rigeur.  But when the next crop of Cambridge kids are heading to the Mahal for a ‘Noughties Swap’, what will they remember about this century’s debut?

Bling probably captures the pre-cession cheer: remember how for around eight of the ten years, we all had more money than we knew what do with (or at least, banks did)? WAGs exhibited appropriate excessiveness: orange skin? Check. Implausibly spherical breasts? Check. Interchangable, overpriced outfits with matching shoes and bag? Check.

The high street helpfully churned out catwalk imitations for those without a Premier League lifestyle. Primark and Topshop became the new stomping grounds for those looking for a quick fashion fix, and high street and high fashion collided with collabs like Christopher Kane for Topshop. Who could lose, besides your bank balance?

On the edgier side of things, club culture made a reappearance, and Agyness Deyn happened to step into the limelight just as the nu-rave zeitgeist needed a face. In housemate Henry Holland’s irreverently garish t-shirts (“I’ll show you who’s boss, Kate Moss”) and a bleached crop that became the ‘Rachel’ for our decade, Deyn dominated fashion.

Fashion crazes included the ridiculous It Bag mania: Chloe’s coveted chunky Paddington bag weighed several kilos even when empty. Hightop trainers and skinny jeans have yet to loosen their viper grip on our ankles, which is pretty great as far as we’re concerned - much cheaper than a Chloe bag.