Christmas 2012: Art books of the year Bridging Germany and photography, Wolfgang Tillmans's Neue Welt (Taschen, £27.99) housed this year's boldest new camera-wielding. Vastly ambitious and super-attentive to pictorial nuance (as the extensive opening interview with curator Beatrix Ruf makes clear), Tillmans has upgraded his medium's artistic status as decisively as Eggleston did. In terms of critical writing, the standouts this year were both by British authors born in 1958, and both approaching art and culture from avowedly personal angles. For The Space Between (Ridinghouse, £20), Michael Bracewell - a burnished stylist who began favouring art writing over novels and music-centric cultural criticism a decade ago - gathers his art-related scribing. This is a far tauter book than one might expect from a round-up of old catalogue essays and art-magazine articles, partly due to the unifying effect of Bracewell's aesthete-with-muscle-tone voice, his devotion to close yet contextual viewing, and his particular outlook - which makes a continuity of Pop, punk, postmodernism and Englishness (if in doubt, quote Auden or Lydon). But its chief pull is that, organised by date of subject matter rather than of publication, The Space Between functions as a strobe-lit chronology of British art from the Sixties onward, from Richard Hamilton to Damien Hirst. If the trajectory aims downward, so be it. Bracewell shares a high-wire ability to privilege his own slanting subjectivity with Geoff Dyer, who's written extensively on art (mostly photographic) in the past and has rarely written a more careening book than Zona (Canongate, £9.99), which uses Andrei Tarkovsky's art-house masterpiece Stalker as the pretext for a bravura circumnavigation of the author's own head. Paralleling the film-maker's "special intensity of attention" yet endlessly glancing dilatorily away from the screen, it's a consciously genre-less project. For every burst of cineaste evaluation there's a mention of Dyer's father's fear of overpriced choc-ices, Kafka, Chernobyl, Björk, the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, et cetera. Yet the author's bounding, bare-nerves tone, and implicit argument that the critical act has no edges, make it fly. In the category of artists" writings, meanwhile, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (Library of America) is an out-of-the-blue beauty. The late American fashioner of Pop-flavoured collages and paintings - who died of an Aids-related condition in 1994, and whose self-described "one major work" in words, the 136-page prose-poem "I Remember" (1975) that opens this chunky compilation, positions him as a demotic American Proust - was a wildly various, wildly life-loving writer. The subsequent pages brim with sweet hits of pleasure: casual poems tabulating offbeat likes and dislikes ("pink nuns and salty peanuts, and Renoir who bores me" - shades of Frank O'Hara, a friend and occasional lover); sensualist screeds; autobiographical thumbnail sketches (Brainard alone with Mozart and Campari, snow falling outside "against a translucent sky of deep lavender"); and the artist's antic drawings, putting words into the mouths of characters from the funny pages of old newspapers. People of the World: Relax! Make all the noise you want to on the toilet: people will hear you but it does not matter," one of these reads. Bathroom reading par excellence, then, but Collected Writings works everywhere else too. For sheer charm, though, two books share the laurels: Artwork (LRB/Profile, £30) is a lovely tribute to Peter Campbell, an integral part of the London Review of Books" visual and verbal identity who not only painted virtually every cover since it stopped usuing photographs - in his flowing, intimist watercolour style - for two decades until his death in 2011, but was also the journal's unshowy art critic. The practices, judicious yet understated, feel of a piece. This cleanly designed volume reproduces numerous covers, watercolours, smart little cartoons soliciting subscriptions and book covers, along with a long, illuminating essay by Jeremy Harding. Virtually none of Campbell's writing, though, which suggests that a separate compilation is in preparation - or, at least, one hopes so. Christine Davenne and Christine Fleurent's Cabinets of Wonder (Abrams, £30), meanwhile, manages to be something close to what it describes. It's an erudite historical tour of the titular concept, from 15th-century Italian studioli to Wunderkammeren to scientific cabinets of death masks and skeletons. Cue gorgeous photography (by Fleurent), a sleek design and a twist: Davenne asserts that the modern incarnation of the subject is the contemporary art exhibition. Buy these books from Telegraph Books Follow Telegraph Books on Twitter