THE BEST ART SHOWS OF THE YEAR

IN NOVEMBER, Sotheby's made history when it sold for a million bucks a painting made by artificial intelligence. Ai-Da, "the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork auctioned by a major auction house," created a portrait of Alan Turing that resembles nothing more than a bad Francis Bacon rip-off. Still, the auction house described the sale as "a new frontier in the global art market."

- JERRY SALTZ

As I look back on the year in art in New York, in which big claims were made for found art and appropriation and scraps of things being sewn to other scraps of things, I feel there is much, technically speaking, that an artificial intelligence could copy. But what AI is missing (besides, you know, real originality and human consciousness) is the ability to deliver that electric hit of what Werner Herzog calls "ecstatic truth." From the Renaissance all the way up to the feisty capers of Jamian Juliano-Villani and Klara Lidén, we saw humans continue to go where no machine has gone before.

1. "The Way I See It," The Drawing Center

Radical connoisseurship, radical openness, radical generosity: These are the qualities that define the personal collection of Brian Donnelly, a.k.a. KAWS, a selection of which he displayed this fall-more than 350 works on paper by more than 60 outsiders, cartoonists, graffiti masters, illustrators, and others not usually accepted into the canon of high art, from Jim Nutt to Martín Ramírez to neurodivergent genius Nicole Appel. KAWS supposedly owns 4,000 works by artists like these. A museum should show this extraordinary amassment.

2. "Siena: The Rise of Painting," The Metropolitan Museum of Art