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6. Reeducation. To pick up the year in review from last time, all that came for me as another kind of small mercy, an education in what I thought I disliked. I still dislike both Ryan Trecartin and Laurel Nakadate, but their shows at PS1 had to upset my idea of Gen Y art. In much the same way, one may not recall a single artist from Eastern Europe in “Ostalgie,” but the New Museum still gave a new slant on East versus West. I can excuse the Met’s John Baldessari retrospective the very same way—where of course “East” now means New York and “West” means LA.

5. Tried and true. Yet another kind of small mercy came with the tried and true. They extended back to Richard Pousette-Dart in Chelsea, with rarely seen Abstract Expressionist sculpture along with his painting. Among the living, they ran to Agnes Martin in shades of gray, Richard Serra on paper and in his largest sculpture ever, and Mark di Suvero both in the gallery and on Governor’s Island. Best of all, Lynda Benglis used her retrospective to sex up and dress down the New Museum.

4. Abstraction. If abstraction was always a small mercy, perhaps a record number of shows showed it alive and well. They included “Geometric Days” at Exit Art, with a splendid short history seen through younger and less-familiar eyes. Better still than Mark Grotjahn, they included a diversity of new faces and summer group shows.

3. Turning away from trash. Sure, the overblown persisted. Did I mention art fairs, Maurizio Cattelan, Carsten Höller, David Altmejd, Matthew Barney, and Terence Koh? I hope not.

Here, too, though, one can look for small mercies. While one prominent voice swooned over Barney, pretty much every other critic had already turned away. Even the record crowds for Cattelan at the Guggenheim and Höller at the New Museum may have a saving grace, if they mean that trashy installations are now officially carnivals. And they, too, may yet run out of rides and attractions.

Trash can have small mercies, too, like the coffee cups with which Gwyneth Leech brightened the holidays and the Flatiron Building. Do Ho Suh destroyed a model building on the scale of a gallery, but he turned out to look to his past and deeply within. Strangely enough, when the Met took up Northern Romanticism, it found not just broken ice and frozen landscapes but interiors as well.

2. Greater losses. The year also held a great loss, with the death of Jeanette Ingberman, who founded Exit Art. It has announced its closure, and I can only wish Papo Colo peace, health, and success in whatever is to come. Death came, too, to Robert Miller, who kept Lee Krasner alive for many of us, although he had retired and his gallery seems largely adrift. John Chamberlain died almost on the eve of his retrospective, and Helen Frankenthaler’s death even closer to year’s end only reinforced the end of a generation.

1. Bigger mercies at last. For all that, a few big mercies mattered, too, and indeed mattered most. Georges Braque on the Upper East Side and Picasso’s guitars at the Modern showed how they changed history, and Cézanne Card Players at the Met gave one the background to understand why. Pablo Picasso also gained from Gagosian’s show of his love for Marie-Thérèse Walter (and, rather less so, from Picasso drawings at the Frick, for all the influence of classic French drawing as seen at the Morgan Library this fall).

This brings to an end my year in review, as a longer article—and my latest upload. So as one last word, and more spellbinding yet, Christian Marclay compressed film history into twenty-four hours of real time, in The Clock. And in MOMA’s first show to date to span the sixth floor, Willem de Kooning encompasses them all.

I shall have no ten-best list this year (unlike in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010). It speaks to the state of the art, which is no longer about the canon or the next big thing. It is not even about a critique of the canon or the next big thing.

Anything goes, but not by breaking political or esthetic boundaries. I mean that it goes all directions at once. Instead of ten best, then, how about ten directions? As you count down to the new year, thank god and 2011 for small mercies.

10. Making do. Perhaps it marked only a pause between biennials and triennials. Or maybe it was just the recession, but museums learned to make do.

And the making was a revelation. MOMA made blockbusters out of its collection, in “Abstract Expressionist New York” and “German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse.” In the process, it found two sides of the museum’s surprisingly rounded history. With “Real/Surreal,” the Whitney, too, managed to see itself and the last century from two sides at once. The Met moved Franz Hals barely two hundred yards, but it put him at the center of Dutch painting.

9. Cleaning up. The Met’s greatest gift, though, came from a part of itself too long unseen, with the reopened Islamic wing. It finds moments of peace, but also a greater range of Islamic and other worlds. Bellini’s Saint Francis at the Frick, newly cleaned and at eye level, brought the equal gift of single-minded concentration.

Others, too, finished something long overdue, starting with the High Line extension. It still has me wavering whether to welcome it as a park or to dismiss it as a parade route, but the tourists are coming fast, and the march is on. The Frick wrapped up its housecleaning, so that Duccio is back on view beside Piero della Francesca. A newly glassed-in portico displays early European porcelain, with that uniquely eighteenth-century mix of material science, geometric clarity, Chinoiserie, and Rococo excess.

8. Anniversaries. A memorial at Ground Zero finally opened as well. That and “September 11” at MoMA PS1 turned a sad anniversary from angry debate or self-serving patriotism to contemplation and actual urban renewal. Romare Bearden had an anniversary as well, his hundredth, and it rescued him from routine. Commemorations included a superb gallery show of Bearden collage. His banner year continues into 2012 with The Block at the Met and the Bearden Project at the Studio Museum.

7. Secret identities. More broadly, African American art stood out—with artists in residence at the Studio Museum, Clifford Owens and Rodney McMillian in performance video, Leslie Hewitt in Chelsea, and intimate new work by both Kara Walker and Mickalene Thomas. (I did not care for Sanford Biggers at SculptureCenter and the Brooklyn Museum.) The Whitney gave Glenn Ligon a fine retrospective, and I have to credit Jack Shainman gallery for its frequent commitment to African and African American artists. Better still, David Hammons once again refused to stand out, with abstraction hiding behind furniture. One can hardly have smaller mercies than that.

Gay identity came easily into the mainstream as well, with “Hide/Seek,” Peter Hujar, and a witty Lower East Side take on “Notes on Camp.” The furor over the first, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, led to showings of David Wojnarowicz’s controversial video all over town. And the show of portraits of and by gays moved on quietly to Brooklyn.

Note: the countdown concludes next time. Hold tight!

With the holidays, allow me almost a day off. Well, perhaps just another word like last time for those dark December days and nights. Is the solstice “auspicious,” with the promise of lengthening days, or terrifying? An eastern tradition says much the same thing about the subject for U-Ram Choe at the Asia Society. (It is an “In Focus” project,” while the floor below is showing Sarah Sze into early spring. I promise a review to come.)

The Korean artist offers Custos Cavum, a tribute to a tenth-century Indian sculpture on display nearby. Remember Shiva, man slayer and destroyer of worlds—or of art? Through December 31, the Hindu god with so many arms has become what the Latin title calls “Guardian of the Hollow.” It has also become a beached-whale skeleton of steel and aluminum with a bronze sheen and rising tentacles. Somewhere between tree branches in winter and lobster claws, they wiggle patiently and await the viewer. You may wonder if the standing resin figures around it, in all their cartoon anonymity, belong to the work or to fellow visitors.

I have to hand it to Howie Chen. Whatever I think about group shows to tide galleries over those long, dark nights, at least he is honest about it. He calls the show, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through January 21, simply “December.” Never mind that most people will stumble into it only after the holidays. Never mind that they will be scratching their head at not a sign of humanity or snow. It still counts as truth in advertising, and the darkness will still be hanging over the new year.

For those sick and tired of group shows, he also achieves a welcome focus with, it appears, a proper handful of artists. And what they have in common is the darkness. Someone has set a small, misshapen but vaguely humanoid lump on a pedestal, beside an only slightly smoother brown lump stuck to the wall. Did you know that a potato was of the nightshade family? By far the most prolific hand might have scratched, cracked, or marked illegibly on glass and black MDF. With a little struggle, one might make out RICH &, but almost surely neither one’s own reflection nor FAMOUS.

Fame here is just out of sight, along with recognition. And wait, for by far the largest mirror has a blood-red scrawl that one can hardly help reading, for the artist seems to stop only because he has run out of space. It veers painfully between sexting, confession, apologies, and confusion. One could look for help to the press release, but it presents only a long paragraph of nouns and adjectives, like a shattered ode to winter. One will have to decide for oneself its mood or its relevance, from pathos to diffidence. Like the rest of the literal hall of mirrors, it amounts to what Stephen in Ulysses called “the cracked glass of a servant.”

By now, one might start to get the idea that nothing is as plain as it seems, even the show’s title. One lump or two? Jean Dubuffet created the first in 1954, with a mysterious title a few letters away from Sorcerer, while Margaret Lee modeled the potato. Several artists worked in blackness and reflection, including Tony Matelli, Cheryl Donegan, and the master of invisibility when it comes to art and identity, David Hammons. Donegan calls hers Not in Love, but with whom? Ian Cheng calls the shiny red scrawl Bigger than Your Blog, which perhaps it is—but starts it Ohm My God, like the compression of text messaging in reverse.

This must be the month for the ambivalent frankness of social media. Leo Koenig offers its own “Dark Christmas,” through January 12. Here Chen has a virtual hall of fame of the creeps—from Hans Bellmer, Pierre Molinier, Paul McCarthy, and Kiki Smith through Gerhard Richter, Andres Serrano, David Wojnarowicz, and Cindy Sherman. Out in Williamsburg, Robert Whitman at Black & White, through January 14, warns of adult content for his Polaroids of Minneapolis in the early 1980s. Striking or not, his friends are trying just a little too hard to party. And Facebook may have made the whole notion of this as sociology or art a period piece.

In “December,” the juxtapositions most deepen and slip away. In context, the scrunched and tacked black fabric of Tom Burr’s Sentimental Suture turns monochrome abstraction into effacement and violence, while the black smile from Joyce Pensato looks on. With his photos of a man with no head and too many arms of legs, Adam Putnam could well be quoting Bellmer or Molinier, and only Max Coyer’s robotic portrait looks out of place. After a rag and paper elephant by Jessica Stockholder, I kept looking for the animal for in Lucky DeBellevue’s scarf folded like bat wings. After Megan Plunkett’s wax-like buttons along corner walls, I saw what looked like a wall label or a prescription, and I wondered what pills she had squashed or taken. Perhaps Joe Bradley needed to take something for the winter blues.

Note: I originally had an aside explaining that I took my heading from “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns, but the best laid schemes. . . .