A traditional Korean house has appeared at Tate Modern. And with its neat brickwork, beautifully carved roof beams and lattice work screens, this charming dwelling looks decidedly out of place, and somewhat ghostly. Go closer and you realise that, improbably, the full-sized building is made of paper. It’s the work of South Korean artist Do Ho Suh (main picture).

In 2013 the American artist, Noah Davis used a legacy left him by his father to create a museum of contemporary art in Arlington Heights, an area of Los Angeles populated largely by Blacks and Latinos. But his Underground Museum faced a problem; it didn’t have any art to put on display and none of the institutions approached by Davis would loan him their precious holdings.

Grandiloquent indie-synth-pop outfit Bastille have been around for over a decade. Three of their four albums have been chart-toppers (the other one still made Top 5 and went Gold). They are no flash in the pan.

Swedish singer Tove Lo appeared at a time when female physical sexuality was being used as a raw, blunt weapon in pop, when porno chic reached an apex in music videos. Half a decade ago was the time of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball”, thus Lo’s overt displays of sexual bravado seemed part of the same and she had big hits with songs such as “Habits (Stay High)” and “Talking Body”.  Her output since, however, has proved her sensual agenda to be more than a passing foible.

It was almost exactly a year ago (January 8, 2013, to be precise) that we awoke to the news that David Bowie, far from dying, retiring, or living the half-life of a rock and roll renunciant in his Riverside apartment, had blindsided us all by sneak-releasing his first new work in a decade on the morning of his 66th birthday.

The weary reflection of "Where Are We Now?” was so perfectly measured, and its nil-by-mouth marketing strategem – in which absence, to paraphrase James Joyce, became the most potent form of presence – so perfect that one wondered whether Bowie shouldn’t just quit while he was ahead: to return with one last sigh of a single and then simply disappear again would have been a deliciously dramatic exit. But there was news of an album, too, and I rather feared it might be a damp squib by comparison.

Even if were possible to unstitch the music on 'The Next Day' from its extraordinary context, who would want to?

When The Next Day duly arrived in March, however, it was far, far better than anyone had any right to expect. Here was a Bowie who made a mockery of the hand-wringing rumours of terminal decay; a Bowie brimful of purpose and direction, unafraid to confront past glories. Musically the album pinched from and pecked at his past, most obviously - and to greatest effect on the title track and the delightfully cracked “Dirty Boys” - the skew-whiff art-rock of Lodger and Scary Monsters, but also revisited the desiccated Fifties rock'n'roll of Aladdin Sane, glossy mid-Eighties blues-pop, and, on "If You Can See Me", even his much-maligned jungle phase.

The Next Day sounded both familiar and fresh. Even better, everywhere you looked there were simply brilliant songs. Best of the bunch was “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die”, a beautiful ballad of dreadful retribution that touched on Bowie's own "Rock and Roll Suicide" and Dylan’s “Trying to Get to Heaven” en route to a dark and deeply personal final reckoning, in which we were warned that "some night on a thriller street / Will come the silent gun." The words on The Next Day were superb: racked, wry, bloodied, furious, reflective, with so much to say it was almost daunting.

I was instantly smitten, and remain so, enough to make sweeping allowances without apology. Objectively, there were two or three tracks (you want names? OK, “Boss of Me” and “Set the World on Fire”) that could have been left on the subs’ bench (although, as it happens, the subsequent Deluxe and Extra editions of the album confirmed that the B-team was hardly lacking in talent: the peppy “So She” and grandiose “The Informer” were two of several heavyweight contenders).

It's not perfect, but it's still the album I cherish most from 2013. Even if were possible to unstitch the music on The Next Day from its extraordinary context, who would want to? It became a better album by virtue of being such an unexpected gift, and also - take note, binge interviewees - for being left by its creator to speak up entirely for itself. After 10 years of nothing I would have happily embraced a patchy, creakily well-meaning return. That what we got instead was a very, very good David Bowie album, full of blood and beauty and heart and angry vigour, was joyous indeed. Frankly, I'm still pinching myself.

• David Bowie: The Last Five Years reviewed on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch the video for "Love is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix)"

With the end of 2013 nearly upon us it's time for a last look back before we step forward into the unknown. Yesterday our rundown of the year's finest films took you from a radiant romance to a bristling biopic, but the nature of such lists means that the best is yet to come and those that remain could hardly be more different. And so - our final five.

5 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)

Not a year in which big names came through, and many on the list below are actually quite introverted and low-key, but none the worse for that. Among numerous global musical gems this year were the following:

There are some that will tell you that they don't make movies like they used to. But even if that's true, film is an art-form that continues to thrive by moving with the times - reflecting change, reinventing itself and each year we're supplied with no shortage of outstanding cinema from across the globe. It's a fact that makes compiling the traditional end-of-year list far from a chore, and more like greedily picking your way through a banquet.

Like some kind of slow-witted zombie, mainstream games (on console, mainly) have been decapitated, disemboweled and run flat over, but don't quite know it yet.

There aren't a lot of harpists in pop. Transatlantic migrations took all sorts of instruments away from their European place of origin to become the building blocks of American music. But there was no sizeable Welsh diaspora so the harp stayed at home with its most diligent exponents. That places singer-songwriter-harpist Georgia Ruth in a musical tradition with deep roots but a less than broad reach.