It can be difficult to concentrate on making art while surrounded by home’s many distractions, such as Netflix, social media, baking sourdough bread, mortal terror, and the possible collapse of civilization. For sculptor Bob Clyatt, though, the quarantine has offered a chance to work in his studio without interruption from the outside world — or whatever’s left of it.

Neon Genesis Evangelion presents itself as a giant robot anime, but action loses its centrality as the series progresses. Minus the tropes of the genre, Evangelion presents a story of how dysfunctional individuals try (and fail) to live their lives while facing a mounting unavoidable catastrophe.

For Ruben Natal-San Miguel, a photographer based in Harlem, the coronavirus pandemic couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time. Cases of the disease in New York started increasing exponentially right before the opening of his solo show at Postmasters Gallery, Women R Beautiful, and the reception had to be cancelled due to social distancing guidelines.

It seems appropriate to hold 2020’s SPRING/BREAK Art Show, a fair themed this year around baroque excess, just blocks away from Billionaire’s Row. The baroque was an era of decadence: the decay of Renaissance rationalism into theatrics, spectacle, and opulence. Today’s world seems similarly degenerate, with our theater of choice being fake news and social media rather than the opera, and the wealth being hoarded by billionaires instead of absolute monarchs. The baroque had Versailles; we have Trump Tower. The only real difference is that Versailles had better decorators.

The idiom “beyond the pale” is said to have several origins in time and place. The word “pale” derives from the Latin palus, meaning “stake” (from which we also get the word “impale”) and refers to a barrier composed of stakes used to mark territorial boundaries that could be crossed by some but not by others.

In his 1946 short story “On Exactitude in Science”, Borges imagined a fallen empire whose cartographers were so precise that their map of the realm was the same size as the territory itself. The map crumbled alongside the empire until all that remained were a few tatters in the desert.