To paraphrase Mark Twain—referring to himself—rumors of New York's demise have been greatly exaggerated. The city and its populus have certainly suffered a great shock. New York Magazine and other local media report that experts are astounded by the number of cases of post-traumatic stress disorder afflicting citizens six months after the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center. But for many others, life goes on. In fact, by the beginning of 2002 Broadway ticket sales, attendance at the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum, and Manhattan housing prices had all reached historic heights.

For those still tuned into the media, cognitive dissonance is now the order of the day. Never has the ubiquity of the media-entertainment state been so clear. American culture is increasingly like a media bath and the (melo)dramas of September 11th are evocative of all-Monica-Lewinsky, all-the-time. This approach may increase the number of papers sold and television shows watched, but I suspect that's only for the short run. After the "dumbing-down" of network news in the 1980s, for example, the big three networks never regained their audiences. According to recent polls, the American public's trust that the media has done a good job reporting September 11th diminished drastically by the end of last year. Unlike "Monica-Gate," which was a guilty pleasure, lots of people have simply tuned out the generally uninformative reporting about September 11th. The implosion of Enron came along and (temporarily) replaced September 11th, as if the public were ready for a change.

News or data, of course, is nothing without a context for understanding it. The anti-intellectualism of the media and the over-kill that bludgeons us with random information and analysis seems aimed at ten-year-olds. Do Americans know much more about energy policy in central Asia than we did in August? Or about official Saudi Islam, which nurtured most of the September 11th killers? The answers are painfully obvious. Interestingly, the last seven months have revealed a huge gap between those who get their information online (meaning through email lists and alternative sources, rather than CNN's or MSNB's websites) and those who don't.

As arts and the news media both approach the condition of entertainment, their core values can be difficult to disentangle. Arts coverage certainly hasn't escaped this media overkill. Consider the front page of the New York Times' art section on December 20. Every one of 5 articles had to do with September 11th. The biggest was "Becoming Mr. ëOf Thee I Sing,': Lee Greenwood Voices Today's Patriotic Fervor," which the elitist paper would never have run before September 11th. It also featured articles about Hollywood producing a propagandistic montage of patriotism called The Spirit of America, three minutes worth of Academy-Awards style film clips, which apparently never materialized. A pop music critic offered a cliched view of music providing "solace and solidarity" after September 11th, and only two actual news stories ran: A review of Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul and the report of a plan to distribute 150,000 free tickets to cultural events to victims' family.

Arts coverage is fatally flawed by the mainstream media's view of the nature of art itself. The traditional view of art's role in crisis was expressed in the New York Times of September 17 as "comfort, replenishment, beauty" and the museum "as a calm haven from devastating events." According to this widespread view, then, art might function as therapy, just as the federal government offered therapeutic-sounding reassurance and infantilizing oversimplification in response to the events of September 11th. This notion that art's primary purpose is healing is a dangerously narrow view. Art can heal, but there are many other roles that art can—and should—play, as well.

I penned a manifesto last September for 911--The September 11 Project: Cultural Intervention in Civic Society, a group which I co-founded, that read in part that "Art can...open up avenues of expression for discussion of hasty military/political action and the conditions that encourage terrorism, it can offer emotional solace and intellectual engagement, and it can help create a community of concern about issues that extend beyond the mainstream gallery-museum nexus." If art can't do all that, culture workers surely can.

The Times' view—the mainstream American view—is oddly contradictory. Bear in mind that art is seen quite differently in the United States than in Europe, Latin America or Japan. In a Puritannical culture, art has to function as something more useful than as the purveyor of mere pleasure. Yet inspiring discussion is not seen as part of the artist's job description; s/he operates strictly in the psychological realm as a producer of beauty or therapy. Artists get no respect if they transcend their roles. (It's impossible to imagine a Vaclav Havel or Maria Vargos Llosa here.) Americans aren't the only ones confused about art, though. Since the birth of modernism (and Marxism) has anybody been able to get theory and practice to jibe?

Unlike the ubiquitous photographs of ash-covered firemen and teary downtown Manhattan residents, I have encountered only a few works since September 11th that raise vital issues and engender discussion. A painter named Juliet Harvey with a studio near the World Trade Center was so incensed by the attacks on her neighborhood that she created riveting nude portraits of Osama Bin Laden as an effeminate weakling. Artist Kathe Burkhart—who splits her time between Amsterdam and New York—created American Burqa, a performance featuring the shrouded artist seen against filmed projections of Manhattan. Its pop cultural ambiguity would have made it (nearly) unpresentable in the U.S. Chris Csikszentmihalyi's Afghan Explorer, a workable prototype of a robotic news transmitter acclimated to the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, alludes to government- and mass media censorship.

Are these works "masterpieces?" Hardly. It's too early for masterpieces, whatever that term might mean in 2002. As New York poet Suheir Hammad wrote in a poem marking his recent return to writing, "I have not written one word. No poetry in the ashes south of Canal Street." And yet the call for masterpieces has been heard from commentators since last September, beginning with London's Daily Telegraph columnist Norman Lebrect who snidely wrote last September(!) that "What Picasso achieved in Guernica and Brecht in Mother Courage is no longer acceptable or perhaps available to painters and playwrights of the postmodern age."

If "masterpieces" about September 11th have been in short supply, not so exhibitions. There has been a bizarre glut of them in New York. Literally dozens by spring. We expect galleries to provide us with up-to-the-minute views of current developments and museums with longer, more considered views. The Max Protetch Gallery mounted an ambitious show "A New World Trade Center: Design Proposals" that featured 50 artists and architects ranging from Asymptote to Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Associates. It opened in January and Max Protetch was quoted as saying that he wanted to mount his show because "Museums can't move so quickly."

In fact, they already had. Institutions felt weirdly compelled to rush in. At first, understandably, with journalistic style photos and videos. The New-York Historical Society opened a show of Magnum Agency photographers' work in November and will opened its third WTC-related show in March. Likewise for the Skyscraper Museum. Spring brought a deluge of memorabilia beginning in March with the Museum of the City of New York, which began collecting shrines and memorabilia from New York streets by the third week of September. All of these shows, incidentally were packed, while conventional museum attendance was down and museum personnel at the Guggenheim and Whitney museums were laid off in October and November.

The most interesting of the early shows was "This Is New York: A Democracy of Images," which opened in Soho in September. An ad hoc gallery was created to display photo images of the disaster. Anybody could be included and visitors could buy digital prints of the images for $25 apiece, which went to charity. This show was very recently recreated as one of three components at the Museum of Modern Art for its "Life of the City" exhibition, where it was complemented by amateur snapshots that could be submitted by anybody as well as pictures of New York, by the museum's favorite photographers ranging from Lee Friedlander to Cindy Sherman.

Clearly good intentions led to every show that opened in New York (and elsewhere). But I think in most cases, curators simply didn't know what to do with their own feelings of grief and anger and created frameworks for art that didn't yet exist. Have there ever before been shows of non-commissioned, non-existent art? This self-induced pressure to respond back in early fall also led to a perhaps inevitable misreading of the mood in 2002, when many New Yorkers don't want to dwell on last fall. I shudder to think of what September 11, 2002 will bring; I'm already aware of more than fifty commemorative exhibitions in the works.

Even the laser-generated Tribute in Lights looks far less compelling within New York than from outside of the city. This "reproduction" of the Twin Towers has been reproduced over and over on television and in print, eerily evoking the media spectacle of the attack itself. It's resemblance to the light-works of Nazi architect Adolf Speer has crossed too many minds in connects with Tribute to be mere coincidence. While I'm not arguing against the need for memorialization, I am concerned about its quality and kind.

Worse than the glut of exhibitions has been a glut of linguistic overkill sufficient to make George Orwell turn in his grave. Language about September 11th has been so twisted and hyperbolic it often means nearly nothing. Consider this exhibition announcement prose from a highly reputable commercial gallery in Miami for an exhibition of surrealist-inflected paintings called "A Time for Tears": "Terrorism has created an inferno...A 'Time for Tears' provides us with a means to renew our commitment to democracy and to see the world and humanity as a whole." Or this from a highly reputable non-profit organization in Manhattan that mounted an open show to which more than a thousand contributors responded with work: "We are living in a historical moment. The essence of life has changed. The World's psyche has been irrevocably altered." There's a point where language gets so overblown it begins to descend a slippery slope that leads either to advertising and propaganda. Although there is a gap between advertising prose and military prose referring to civilians accidentally killed by military bombs as collateral damage, how large is it? After all, most of Orwell's predictions have come true, unlike those of the mass-media's pundits.

Oddly, the fashion columns are invariably a more reliable barometer of fast-changing moods than the front pages. The fall collections debuted in February. For Perry Ellis's we were told that the designer "will celebrate New York with a collection shown on real New Yorkers," that is non-models wearing his clothes. Ellis's representative explained "we wanted to show what New York was really about and we want to give back a bit of appreciation after everything we've all been through." I wonder who he thinks the audience for couture clothes is?

Writer Guy Trebay sarcastically described that long-suffering audience in a New York Times' Fashion Diary column titled "Back to Whatever Normal Is". Referring to September 11th, he wrote: "But the fashion world has been devastated before, most obviously by AIDS. Its survival instinct is impressive...things are, to a remarkable degree, back to normal, the word used here advisedly...People are still acessorizing themselves at fashion shows with pets and children...Concern with seating precedence is as intense as ever...." And Trebay's work isn't simply interpretation, it is reportage. Consider the remarks of Prince Majed al-Sabah—who just opened a multi-million dollar boutique in Kuwait City—in a March column of Trebay's: "It [September 11th] never happened. Fashion is still its own world, and we are still going to buy, we are still going to go out to the best restaurants, we are still going to enjoy ourselves." Ironically, none of Trebay's clarity and directness filters into the supposedly objective "news."

The biggest journalistic and political clichÈ of them all is that "everything" has changed. No more irony; no more moral relativism. Of course this is ludicrous, yet another ploy to sell newspapers. Surely most people would agree that the day that changed the course of recent history was in 1945 when the atomic bomb was dropped. Or the Cuban missile crisis in1962, when nuclear war seemed imminent. Now the Bush administration casually discusses the first-strike use of nuclear weapons. This remarkable revelation made front pages for a week before disappearing and in itself constituted a possible sea-change in American policy . The post-September 11th changes I see are mostly part of the pre-September 11th Republican agenda of huge debts and huge military budgets, fewer taxes and diminished civil liberties.

The level of censorship and oppression is certainly up: In December the FBI raided the Texas Art Car Museum in Houston and interrogated the staff after an anonymous tip that there was dangerous work in the show. The work was a painting about the Gulf War ten years ago showing the Houston skylines in flames. That month in Daytona, Florida, the director and senior curator of the Southeast Museum of Photograph resigned in December after she was told to cancel a February exhibition of photos of Afghanistan. Museum officials claim she was just told to re-schedule it. In Austin, on January 3, the Austin American-Statesman published its annual review of the local music scene. It had a cover image of a burning amplifier, intended to evoke the World Trade Center blaze and signify a bad year for local music. Scores of readers called for the firing of editors but the paper's editor-in-chief Rich Oppel refused to fire anybody and blasted "bumper sticker patriotism." But he also apologized for the cover.

Nor do I see any real change at the National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A), which vetoed two grants last fall: One to gay playwright Tony Kushner who wrote Homebody/Kabul (and won Pulitzer and Tony awards for Angels in America), and the other to African-American performance artist/conceptualist William Pope L. Kushner's grant was re-instated, while Pope L's was not. Despite the conservative restructuring of the N.E.A and the virtual elimination of grants to individual artists, it's onlyAfrican-American, or Latino, or gay/lesbian or political artists who are raked through the coals. Bush's recently-confirmed appointees to the National Council on the Arts that advises the N.E.A chair include Maribeth Walton McGinley, who has fundraising ties to the Heritage Foundation, which has long advocated the elimination of the federal arts agency. It's a reminder of Ronald Reagan's cynical appointment of anti-environmentalist James Watt to preside over the Department of the Interior.

One genuinely surprising development was an unexpectedly large increase in luxury car sales. Danny Clements, general manager of Lexus for the Eastern U.S., recently discussed the reasons for this with the press: "There is not quite the stigma of ëwho are you to buy this fancy car?'...People are saying, 'I deserve to have this car now.'" So September 11th can mean anything, it can justify any policy. It is a tabula rasa.

The events of September 11th have been simultaneously trivialized and blown out of proportion. Until the 1970s, no representations of the Holocaust in art were tolerated. It was believed that art would trivialize such horrific events, which could not be represented. Now I understand why. Four months after September 11th a woman named Kathleen Moore was interviewed about cleaning up her artist's loft two blocks from the WTC and about her bad dreams. "There's no emotion I can put my finger on. We lost more than the towers. We lost something else, indescribable. To look at the site now, my mind cannot grasp it." This isn't a sound bite. Its awkwardness is valuable in an age of slick public relations chatter. Everybody I know who lives around Ground Zero is quite inarticulate about the experience, perhaps it's a response to the hyperbole floating around along with dust in the air. One task art can do in a time of crisis is to help give form to witnessing, as have several September 11th works, such as Jeff Gates' "Dichtomy", where visitors can see personal accounts of the infamous day randomly paired. Virtual community can assume many forms, surely some forms we haven't yet seen will surprise us.

Community is another concept that September 11th has made even more problematic than previously. All that's clear is the term's etymology: It's derived from the Latin—as in common, communal, communism—and it signifies a group's shared values and social responsibilities. But recently the term has begun to be applied to extremely loosely affiliated individuals as in the community of investors or the AOL (America Online) community.

That's because today marketers sell us community as if it were any another commodity or service. But they market the image of community, rather than community itself. Consider upscale housing developments of the past thirty years with their white picket fences. Such developments self-consciously borrow their image of community as nineteenth-century Main Street from Disneyland. For these image makers, community also means a cozy, domestic, anti-urban scale—nothing like New York. The latest development in housing is the upscale shopping mall with homes above the fancy stores. An article about one called Santana Row in California noted that Gucci retains the right to put blinds with its logos in the windows of the very expensive apartments above it. Santana Row will have mimes and strolling mandolin players, but it won't have public parks or schools.

But there is another notion of community as something almost spiritual. A headline in the September 18th issue of the New York Times read: "After a pause, arts companies find their role: Nationwide, people turn to theaters and concert halls for a sense of community." Note that modifier sense, as if the term community couldn't be defined.

This brought to mind a project of1996, for which I asked 14 contributors to TalkBack! A Forum for Critical Discourse, an online journal about online art and cyberculture, to define community. The context then was the relationship of real-life community and its virtual counterpart and the contributors were all actively engaged in online community building. It was an historic juncture when the World Wide Web was being transformed from an intimate, non-commercial communications medium into a full-fledged mass medium dependent on e-commerce.

The response that haunts me now is by writer and online-cafÈ producer Allan Coleman. He eloquently observed that "I haven't felt myself part of a functioning community—in either my personal or professional life—since sometime back in the early 1970s. And I seem to encounter less and less genuine communitarian energy in my travels than I used to. Yet I refuse to succumb to the tempting assumption that it has vanished for good...while I'm not sure that 'community' now exists in American culture...I believe that maintaining the idea of community, and trying to exemplify some of its possibilities, remains a useful project." Whether we can define it or not, there's no doubt that community was in remarkable evidence last fall, if not yet in art.

During the late 1960s, artists tried to make common cause with the revolutionary upheavals of the day. But given the nature of artmaking at that time, artists could only make posters or raise funds. It was virtually impossible to directly address social or political issues in their work. By time the AIDS crisis struck the U.S. in the 1980s, American art—thanks to the contribution of a second generation of conceptualist and feminist artists like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Group Material—was uniquely poised to represent and engage the social consequences of this invisible killer. This accident of history along with the widespread presence of gay men in the art world made AIDS-arts en masse the most vital body of thematic American art of the 20th century. (In addition to the output of visual artists like Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring, artists working in other forms—such as the writers Edmund White, Sarah Schulman and Craig Lucas, and the composers David del Tredici and John Corigliano to name just a few—have produced revelatory AIDS works.) More relevant in this context, art about AIDS raised virtually all of the issues currently bedevilling discourse about art and September 11th.

Like the events of September 11th, AIDS was highly mediated. After the identification of HIV in 1982, the news media responded with a voyeuristic onslaught of images of emaciated victims dying of AIDS. By the mid-1980s, activist photographers responded with images of healthy looking people with AIDS but they didn't work because their subjects looked like average Joes and Janes; it was impossible to tell what these traditional, modernist portraits signified. And while they may have bucked up the spirits of people with AIDS at the time, they are not very interesting as art.

The abstracting, non-journalistic effects of art first appeared in an exhibition of serial portraits of people with AIDS by photographer Nicholas Nixon at the Museum of Modern Art. The direct-action group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) protested against Nixon's "negative," but hardly untrue images of dying AIDS patients. They distributed a leaflet called for images of healthy looking subjects. The age-old question of ëWho should art serve?' was now being addressed to artists and institutions in a contemporary context. Art as sentimental pablum is unlikely to ever lose its popularity. Joe McNally's "Faces from Ground Zero," a show of life-sized Polaroid prints that hung in Grand Central Station and received extraordinary amounts of attention featured only positive (and sentimental) views of rescue workers and even politicos like former mayor Guiliani.

Other critical issues connecting AIDS and September 11th focus on the nature of art and memorialization: In a crisis what should art be? Is it something for the short term or the long term? Is it a record? Is it therapy? And who gets to speaks for whom? The families of the victims of September 11th have demanded a perhaps inordinate amount of input—given their lack professional experience—on design, architectural and urban policy matters related to the rebuilding of downtown Manhattan. (One historical mistake of this kind was the erection of Frederick Hart's now-widely reviled, figurative statue of soldiers to "complement" Maya Lin's powerful Vietnam War Memorial in Washington and placate those who found it too abstract and somber.) It also seems likely that the current scandal fomented by Holocaust survivors protesting The Jewish Museum's thoughtful exhibition "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery in Recent Art" was exacerbated by heightened, post-September 11th sensibilities in the city. Who owns history?

The U.S. currently remains blanketed with flags, perhaps a disquieting number given the varied interpretations such a symbol can evoke. (Like the cross, which can symbolize everything from liberal Christian theology to the racism of the Ku Klux Klan, the flag has a long and checkered history.)When it comes to symbol-making and Public Art, artists never made a bigger impact than during the initial AIDS crisis. All the emblems of the epidemic are brilliant artist-produced designs, not schmaltzy Elton John songs: They include Silence = Death, the Red Ribbon, and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt. Each of them was targeted to a different audience and employed a different mode of address. I don't have to write much about them since I know that they remain familiar. But again, none of these symbols were created quickly; it took years rather than months or weeks for these responses to emerge.