Keeping up with contemporary art in New York is not for the faint-hearted, the squeamish, or the easily disappointed. It demands open-mindedness and the will to let hope triumph over experience. And it demands stamina, not only because of the astonishing number of artists at work in and around the city today, but also because getting to their studios and the places they show requires increasingly long trips on the L and F trains or the elusive G and, sometimes, forays to New Jersey or Staten Island. So it was encouraging to hear that P.S. 1 and its parent organization, the Museum of Modern Art, were jointly organizing “Greater New York 2005,” a second version of the rather slapdash overview of current work in the city and its environs that marked the official association of the two institutions five years ago.[1]Admittedly, it’s a given that any survey of this sort will be idiosyncratic, skewed, and inherently inadequate, full of peculiar inclusions and inexplicable exclusions, although just how idiosyncratic, skewed, inadequate, peculiar, and inexplicable, and in what ways, will depend on whom you ask. Alarm bells should have sounded at the news that the opening of “Greater New York 2005” would coincide with the much touted, raucous contemporary art fair on the pier, confusingly called “The Armory Show” (reviewed by James Panero in the April issue), but since no one can pretend that today’s art world is not driven by marketing and positioning, it still seemed reasonable to