It was a year of understatement at the movie theater, when the silent killing fields of No Country For Old Men and the low-key legalese of Michael Clayton drew us in. It was a year of shrewd salesmen, in TV's Mad Men, and of dysfunctional families, in Broadway's triumphant August: Osage County. It was a year we pondered an Earth reclaimed from human destruction in the best-selling The World Without Us. And that doesn't include the DVDs, songs, concerts and exhibitions that blew us away. Here they are: The year's most exciting artistic achievements.