Best Art of 2024

This was a year whose high points included Joan Jonas’s luminous survey, the extravaganza “PST ART,” and the 24-karat beauty of a show “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350.”

Art-wise, 2024 had an in-between-things vibe. It was a year of big-deal biennials, but the consensus was that none delivered much firepower. There was a lot of talk about money — what sold for what, and to whom — but no radically record-busting news. In general, the institutional art world veered, as it always does, between uplift (some strong museum shows) and cringe (the $6.2 million banana). I’ll go mostly with uplift in the (unranked) list of highlights below.

How to be long-term luminous was the lesson taught by “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning” at the Museum of Modern Art, a six-decade survey of the still intensely active career of one of our most inventive contemporary artists. Over the years, Jonas, now 88, has broken experimental ground in video, photography, performance, conceptual art and installation, giving everything she touches the warmth of a watchfully lived life. It’s evident from gallery to gallery at MoMA, and in a concurrent show of works on paper, “Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” at the Drawing Center in SoHo. (Read our review of “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning.”)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art had a good year. Its current show “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” is a 24-karat display of some of the dreamiest early Italian Renaissance painting on earth, all from a stylistic universe that held a medieval vision of heaven as an ocean of gold close to its heart (through Jan. 26). In “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” the museum had another hit. The show settled historical scores by giving full and careful attention to art the Met had once ignored. And in a broad-stroke way, it prepared the ground for other, incisive views of Black Modernism to come. (Read our reviews of “Siena: The Rise of Painting” and “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.”)

For the third edition of the multi-venue art extravaganza once called “Pacific Standard Time,” now “PST ART,” the Getty Foundation, its funder and organizer, asked some 70 Southern California cultural institutions to cook up exhibitions on the theme of “Science and Art Collide.” It was a baggy assignment but some results rose to the occasion. The Getty’s own exhibition, “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light,” did through pure breath-catching visual scintillation. So did a small survey, assembled by LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), devoted to the conceptual artist Beatriz da Costa, who, in her short life — she died of cancer at 38 — called on the energies of plants and birds in projects aimed at planetary healing (through Jan. 5). (Read our critic’s notebook about “PST ART.”)