My choice of the most thoughtfully curated exhibition in the last 12 months is Art Turning Left at Tate Liverpool.

Running until February 2, it brings together a large range of art works from across the world in many different media and with many differing styles and approaches.

But what unites them all is the commitment to integrate left-wing values of democracy and equality into creative practice and for that practice to be politically engaged.

The result, powerful political art, perfectly illustrates Brecht's contention that art is not a mirror held up to reality but a "hammer" with which to shape it.

Good political art has to entertain, enlighten and reference tradition while still packing a contemporary political punch and that's absolutely in evidence in Grayson Perry's The Vanity Of Small Differences, a series of tapestries he made following his TV programmes on the links between taste and class.

Entertaining and perceptive, punkishly witty but morally serious, the tapestries show how taste, clothes and lifestyle are grounded in the class system.

Like his Reith lectures, Perry's tapestries are a breath of fresh air in the often puzzling trivialities and obscurities of the art world.

The exhibition, currently running in Manchester, then tours Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds until October next year.

The Perry touring exhibition started in north-east England, which also premiered The Lost World Of Norman Cornish at the University Gallery in Newcastle.

Cornish has a much more traditional approach than Perry but is also concerned to memorialise and celebrate the emotional truths of life for working-class men and women. The show runs in Newcastle until the end of January and in London from March until May.

Staying in the north-east, the prize for sheer integrity and a consistent focus year in, year out on the documentary photography of working-class life has to go to the Side Gallery in Newcastle, run by the Amber collective.

All its exhibitions this year have been good but perhaps the most searingly honest and relevant, in the year of Thatcher's death, was True Grit: A Celebration Of Northern Realism.

It documented the same working-class communities enduring the destructive impact of Thatcherite economics as Perry does in his tapestries and Cornish in his paintings.

And it showed the extraordinary beauty of everyday life among the poor, the young and the powerless, with all its moments of struggle, playfulness and reflection.

That particular show, and others focusing on street life in Victorian Britain and contemporary "outsider" communities, has ended.

But you can be sure that any Side Gallery exhibitions will be worth catching in 2014.