For his list of the top-20 photo books of 2011, Alec Soth decided to categorize by genre: Crime, Comedy, Family Drama, etc.

Yates McKee looks at how artists within the Occupy movement have “transformed and contested urban space in architectural, visual and symbolic terms.”

“Given Merce Cunningham’s lifelong capacity for reinvention, it is no surprise that he is posthumously pushing the Walker Art Center to rethink how and what it collects,” writes the Walker’s Abigail Sebaly.

Artist Anselm Kiefer on collector Charles Saatchi’s recent opinion about the vulgarity of the art world: “He described himself, no? [These days] art becomes fashion, it becomes [financial] speculation, but Saatchi started it.”

“The carnivalesque occupation of Wall Street is a symbolic struggle to break the high-low binarism that has besieged contemporary American society,” writes Claire Tancons, a curator (and former Walker staffer) who has focused on carnival traditions in recent years.

This heart-wrenching three-part visual chronicle of 2011 sparks a wide range of thoughts, from “we’re all in this together” to “good riddance” for a year best put behind us.

Google’s “doodle” honors Mexican muralist Diego Rivera today, but “[w]hile Rivera might have approved of Google bringing art to the masses in this way, the Marxist artist’s view of the multi-billion dollar internet giant may have been rather more critical.”

“I am an artiste.” So says serial streaker Mark Roberts, whose 506th outing was the Turner Prize ceremony. He succeeded getting on stage, but was thwarted from his goal of doing a “mini ballerina dance.”