Philip Kennicott’s top art and architecture of 2011

It was a year without theme or focus, haunted by financial and political anxieties, but culturally diffuse. Which is to say, a year like most others in this age of no dis­cern­ible isms or movements, no dominant ideologies, no marching to a single manifesto. The opening of major memorials to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, gave the late summer an elegiac quality, but that was a mere punctuation in a year best remembered as another annum of too much stuff and too little time. Pity the artist in an era when culture is chaotic and unorganized, when noise rather than harmony is dominant. It’s hard to be heard. But the best always stands out, and the following certainly made it into the wild scrapbook of memories from the worlds of art and architecture.