On the ground: it may be true, as Aldous Huxley once wrote, that "a large city cannot be experientially known." But we can still seek out its stories. For the second year running, Artforum asked writers and artists, each from a different point on the globe--New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Tokyo--to reflect on local currents in 2005.

New York

I KNOW SOMETHING MUST HAVE HAPPENED this year besides Paris Hilton. I was recently in a video store scanning the new-releases board. A video clerk had penned an amusing one-line summation of House of Wax: "Paris Hilton dies in this remake of the horror classic." Diderot, too, had a flair for deflating concision, describing in his Salon of 1767 Jean-Baptiste Leprince's Portrait of a Young Girl Abandoning her Toys in Favor of Study as a "mediocre picture, but an excellent lesson for a child." Too bad contemporary critical etiquette prohibits such terse ...

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