The arts have a long history of reaching zenith at times of either peril, or, plenty. They are, as artists strive to depict the spirit of their times, at their most piqued-and-political, or, their most abundant-fecund-limpid. Significantly, the perilous and the plentiful are interconnected spatially (even if temporally distinct) by "the street, " and "the spectacle," symbolized by: a) the barricade; b) the promenade; and c) their corollaries in the arcade, the garden, and the stadium. Revolutionary action, bourgeois life, and proletarian leisure take place outdoors (or in those in-between spaces of the shopping center, sports hall, and stadium). Think on either the perilous Paris of 1848 that delivered the streetwise realism of Courbet and Manet, or, the flowering of the Third Republic evincing the elegant strollers of Pissarro and Seurat: the work of the four cited artists is connected by the site-and-subject of their work (even if their intentions are opposites).

As, for the most of us artists included, the peril of the Covid virus is abstract (as we cannot see it or touch it) and until the moment of infection it exists in the world beyond the walls of our homes it is near impossible to depict. Though its impacts, which have drastically altered the way in which many of us live, are imminent though inexplicable; and as such many artists have headed elsewhere for their inspiration towards a radical exteriority and/or radical interiority. Art has headed both for the far reaches of time-and-space in a past-meets-far-out-future continuum (the Greeks and Sumerians wrestle ET and Storm troopers!) and for the inner-spaces of the psyche, corpus, and id (the super-ego, meanwhile, is taking a long vacation).