The British art year always feels like it ends with the announcement of the Turner prize. That's when the lights go off. Before they did, Channel 4 and Tate Britain mounted a Z-list celebrity telefest award ceremony, mostly populated with the denizens of OK magazine and other art-ignorant "personalities", the cheque being handed over to winner Martin Creed by Madonna, who upstaged the event with a pre-watershed, and cynically calculated and redundant expletive. This is how the Turner comes of age in the 21st century: not with a whimper but with a bleep.
The year had got off to a shaky start at Tate Modern, which staged an overview of nine international cities at key artistic moments in the 20th century in its first major exhibition, Century City, last January. This patchy, ill-coordinated exhibition deserved, and received, plenty of expletives of its own, even as visitor numbers soared. Lagos was a lazy mess, Vienna a Freudian nightmare, London a perverse and confusing attempt to avoid precisely the art that most people had come to identify with the last decade of the century. The Rio section, concentrating on the 1950s and 1960s, was beautiful, and made you want to be there. Paris, as ever, was a tease.
The first show I really liked in 2001 was upriver at Tate Britain, a survey of the work of Tacita Dean. Fernsehturm, her film set in the revolving Telecafe overlooking Berlin's Alexanderplatz, was, for me, a revelation. You felt you were inside Europe's Cyclopean eye, turning as the daylight died and the lights came on.
The 49th Venice Biennale was, as ever, also a rough ride, never mind the Turneresque sunsets over the lagoon. The highlights for me were Robert Gober's American Pavilion, in which the relative emptiness of the galleries mirrored the vacuity of the American psyche; Belgian Luc Tuymans's paintings, dealing with his country's colonial intrigues in Africa; and the frightening reconstruction of a section of Gregor Schneider's house in Germany, with its rancid corners, rubbish-strewn crawl spaces and unremittingly creepy atmosphere. Suddenly, I'm aware that the art I was most drawn to here had an edge of melancholy and malaise; jaundiced views of the world, a counterpoint to all those parties, all those Camparis and overpriced Bellinis.
The Royal Academy took us to Italy in January, with The Genius of Rome, a show that included perhaps 15 Caravaggios (one at least was debatable), while the National Gallery bought us Vermeer and the Delft School. Light was the key to both shows: in the case of Caravaggio an almost cinematic chiaroscuro, in Vermeer a plain, clear, northern daylight. Light too in The Spirit of an Age, the National Gallery's borrowings from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, with the sickly melancholia of Caspar David Friedrich's creepy nocturnes. Oddly, the most memo rable moment was an 1845 painting of an empty, sunlit room by minor painter Adolf Menzel. This was melancholic too, all the more disquieting for its utter normality.
Two drawing shows - Goya's notebooks at the Hayward Gallery, and the entire extant drawings by Botticelli illustrating Dante at the Royal Academy - were relevatory, not least because both exhibitions made one aware of both the breadth of the medium, and the clarity and depth of what it is capable of. There were also points in both shows that made one laugh, as well as moments of great poignancy; in the case of Botticelli's Dante, we saw an extreme range, not only of drawing skills and styles, from crude knock-about to delicacy and grace, but of emotional tenor, degrees of seriousness and light-heartedness.
Critic John Berger recalled Dante, too, in his reaction to Juan Munoz's vast installation Double Bind, still in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. This, for me, was the work of the year. Munoz's sudden, unexpected death at the end of August was shocking. His American mid-career retrospective, opening in Washington in October, and about to travel to Los Angeles, proved that individuality and imagination always win out against the pathetic rectitudes of fashion and manners. Munoz's work dealt with the inexplicable, often through the orchestration of groups of sculpted figures, the invention of street corners and piazzas, the concentration on details - a banister rail, an empty balcony or a view across a deserted room . His work wanted the density and scope of great literature, the texture of real life, the singularity of an unexpected confrontation.
As I have said elsewhere, there are people who make art and there are artists: Munoz was an artist. His work was also unclassifiable, deceptive, out of step with fashion, entirely itself - in the way that the books of WG Sebald and Elias Canetti are. Canetti's The Voices of Marrakesh was one of the many sources and references that went into Double Bind. Sebald's death last week ,in a car crash, was another terrible blow to culture. The last book I passed to Munoz, earlier this summer, was Sebald's Rings of Saturn. A rotten year, in so many ways, but one that reminded us of the need for serious art, serious, individual voices.
