AS ELSEWHERE, the impact of social distancing on Mexico City’s artistic activity has been relentless. This year, the closest thing we have to the city’s annual Gallery Weekend, a hectic, weeklong affair canceled due to Covid-19, is the novel initiative “Museo Autoservicio” (Self-Service Museum). Conceived by curator and Mexican modern art scholar Daniel Garza Usabiaga, the project’s first outing, titled “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” and on through December 20, appoints itself (falsely) as “the first-ever drive-thru exhibition.” Installed in the underground parking lot of

“If I saw it

I felt it

If I felt it

I learned from it.”

—Peter Gizzi, “EVERYDAY I WANT TO FLY MY KITE,” from Now It’s Dark

“Generalizing is part of what causes depression. The more we generalize, the more separate we become. The more we get specific with each other, and actually hang out, and actually try to solve the problems, the better life is.”

—Taylor Mac

In The Changing Light at Sandover

The hierarchies of heaven

Are revealed to James Merrill

And his partner David Jackson

By their familiar, a handsome

Young Jew from 4th Century

Greece named Ephraim, whom

They contact via a Ouija

Board, their fingers

A LARGE CHUNK of the Queens Museum is taken up by its most famous attraction: the permanently installed and periodically updated to-scale Panorama of the City of New York built for the World’s Fair in 1964. Commissioned by Robert Moses, the urban planner instrumental in engineering a postwar city that catered to an exclusionary class of day-tripping managers as a growing undercommons transitioned to a service or underground economy, its proximity to a current exhibition on housing injustice and urban planning, “After the Plaster Foundation, or, ‘Where can we live?,’” makes for a rich historical

EARLIER THIS MONTH, France’s National Assembly took a step toward the restitution of colonial plunder promised by President Emmanuel Macron three years ago, voting unanimously to return twenty-six objects to Senegal and one to Benin. That same week, the Dutch government published an official report that strongly recommends the return of looted cultural objects, and even suggests that important artifacts legally purchased from former colonies be considered for repatriation. Though the scope of the French legislation is narrow—Beninese President Patrice Talon expressed disappointment that France

Artforum has invited artists to share a text, image, or video in the immediate wake of the United States presidential election and will be posting their contributions throughout the next week.

(ACHILLEA MILLEFOLIUM) Reputedly, simply holding the energetic achillea millefolium grants psychic protection. Pressing it to the forehead cleanses the third eye and brings chakras into balance. Yarrow’s effects on blood are evidenced even in its name—achillea, for Achilles who carried it to Troy to treat his troops. Soldiers used it through the First World War to stop blood loss. It’s also known as woundwort

Artforum has invited artists to share a text, image, or video in the immediate wake of the United States presidential election and will be posting their contributions throughout the week.

I AWOKE ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, November 4, to the news of a still-too-close-to-call election. I went for a run in my neighborhood of Edgewater, on the north side of Chicago, and on my way home, I passed by the site of the former Edgewater Hospital. Closed since the 1990s, the hospital was the birthplace of John Wayne Gacy and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Demolition of the site began in early 2017, shortly after

Artforum has invited artists to share a text, image, or video in the immediate wake of the United States presidential election and will be posting their contributions throughout the week.

LORD LOVE the Hot Humpy Dork Party!

When the weather is warm in Berlin there is nothing I adore more than riding on my trusty Dutch girl’s bicycle around the city, art-stalking that rarest of rare breeds, the species affectionately known as the hotus humpyus dorkus. Humpy dorks are generally young men slightly on the diminutive side but not always, who aren't fully aware of their sexual attractiveness and innate

Artforum has invited artists to share a text, image, or video in the immediate wake of the United States presidential election and will be posting their contributions throughout the next week.

OPTIMISM? PESSIMISM?

Exhibit A

**

THE BIDEN CAMPAIGN contacted me in early August, to ask my blessings for their project. And now they have blessed me. It’s overwhelming to be part of Biden’s first post as president-elect, the one in which he announces victory—to be part of its celebration. I still break out in sobs of joy and relief. I can’t help myself.

Exhibit B

DID WE EVER have a democracy here? When

Artforum has invited artists to share a text, image, or video in the immediate wake of the United States presidential election and will be posting their contributions throughout the next week.

FOR A FEW NIGHTS AND DAYS AFTER NOVEMBER 3, I lost my appetite. Nothing tasted appealing. It was during then that I realized the coronavirus and the political plague that is the current administration share a striking similarity: They both deprive us of our senses.

Losing our senses of taste and smell are two defining symptoms of Covid. Social distancing has also deprived our sense of touch and of proximity

Artforum has invited artists to share a text, image, or video in the immediate wake of the United States presidential election and will be posting their contributions throughout the next week.

Artforum has invited artists to share a text, image, or video in the immediate wake of the United States presidential election and will be posting their contributions throughout the next week.

Artforum has invited artists to share a text, image, or video in the immediate wake of the United States presidential election and will be posting their contributions throughout the next week.