Standing in the dark surrounded by whispering, muttering, heavy-breathing, wailing, foot-stomping, hand-clapping, lecturing, hectoring, swaying, line-dancing, rabble-rousing, singing, mind-fucking, roaring, game-playing performers in Tino Sehgal's This Variation at Documenta 13 in Germany this summer, I could barely drag myself away. I returned again and again. Later, Sehgal bought yet another mass performance to Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. These Associations was all walking, talking, running and storytelling by a rolling cast of more than 200 performers, many of whom got so engaged in the project over the months that some have told me it has changed their lives.

Where was the audience in all this? We were told stories as we walked the ramp and stood under the bridge. Painful stories and funny anecdotes, rites of passage and private revelations. The performers ran rings around us. Was it dance, theatre, therapy? Sehgal's performances are sometimes all these things, and more. This was a choreography of real life, an orchestration of random encounters.

From singing gallery attendants to confrontations with children, Sehgal's works are frequently as disarming as they are surprising, as moving as they are funny. In his art you can be treated to badinage about art and economics, a lecture about the market, a science-fiction story or a re-enactment of famous kisses in art history. He has made me laugh and he has made me cry, I am not ashamed to say.

I have run out and grabbed strangers by the lapels, to get them to go and watch. At its best, performance is much more than entertainment. Earlier this year, in a screening at the South London Gallery, I watched a filmed 1990s re-enactment of a 1964 performance, Site, by Robert Morris, shot by the incomparable film-maker Babette Mangolte. The performance was about Manet's Olympia, played by Carolee Schneemann, who was first hidden, then uncovered in a breathtaking juggling act with plywood boards by Morris. Art history, minimalism, dance, vaudeville slapstick and feminism came together in this seminal work. If only Tate Modern's Bigger Splash show about painting after performance had had the wit to include this film. Performance art has come to have a repertoire, however ephemeral some of its actions. There's a lot to live up to, and Sehgal does, as well as expanding the territory. Some people just don't get it. But that's OK, because plenty do.

Surprise of the year: A bronze figure reclining on a marshy glade, the sculpture's head a swarm of live bees; a pair of dogs, one with a leg dyed pink, gamboling through the undergrowth; an uprooted Joseph Beuys oak, the ghost of Robert Smithson and a garden of psychotropic plants were all part of French artist Pierre Huyghe's haunting and unforgettable contribution.

Services to regional tourism: What Constable did for Suffolk's Stour Valley, and Peter Scott for ducks flying over Norfolk reed-beds, David Hockney has done for East Yorkshire. If you see a man with an iPad loitering in a cloud of smoke by the roadside and doing something ghastly to the view, do approach him, and tell him to stop.

Notion of the year: You can't get away from notions. They're everywhere, in press releases, on gallery wall panels and in catalogue essays. As this Tate press release says: "The artist questions our understanding of notions such as art, Africa, and the west." Gulp. In order to help readers keep up with the fast-expanding world of notions I am setting up a Daily Notions Alert, which can be delivered to your device for a small consideration. There's even an app. Don't forget – we go through the notions, so you don't have to!

Gradgrind of the year: Michael Gove, for cutting arts subjects from the core curriculum for the new schools baccalaureate.Hero of the year: As last year, it's still Ai Weiwei. And Pussy Riot. And anyone else who won't shut up and do or say what they're told, and who suffers the consequences.Video of the year John Akomfrah's The Unfinished Conversation, a three-channel portrait of the lives and times of Stuart Hall, at the Liverpool Biennial. Moving, beautiful, mournful and uplifting, talent met talent, words met images and postwar England met its wisest cultural thinker.