Looking around, paging through art magazines, going to museum and galleries I am struck by the calm, the business as usual, the 'blah,' the overwhelming monotony, what's going on?  Post 9-11 (September 11, 2001) the art world, and artists seem to have lost their legs.  No longer able to take  radical opposition or find concurrence with a world of crazy (paranoid and at war).  A great standoff has overtaken the American scene (at least in my NewYorCentic mind).  Artists who by and large find war and violence abhorrent are without recourse on all fronts.  Does the World Trade Center tragedy only balance U.S. policy post World War II with regard to most of the rest of the world (especially those people of color who do not 'share' our beliefs)?  Does it not just start to even the score for playing all sides in "our national [best] interest" (so Americans can consume more, drive bigger, and play "good" cop so long as the victim is strategic, i.e. Kuwait)?  Or is the "War on Terror" just? After all, people conspired and executed flying fully loaded jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and even some into the ground in Pennsylvania, killing thousands of people.

Art is, by my estimation, numbed at the face of the two horrors.  It cannot react like the late 1980s and early 1990s with a polarized politic decrying the need for socioeconomic opportunity for any who feel disenfranchised.  Nor can it take the stance of the late 1990s, Dave Hickey advocated approach of bringing some actual beauty into the world – sometimes at the expense of content (but beauty is content!).  Both periods in retrospect were good; we fought the man with self-righteous didacticism and then partied like it was 1999 (and shit it was!).  Both models, Reagan/Bush– the first– gave us a model of opposition, everything we didn't want, and Clinton–the second–was like the fun uncle who would sneak us beer and girly mags when our parents weren't looking.  But now, we have another Bush, too dumb and a tad too cute in a marsupial kind of way to really hate, and the world seems too bleak.  I am reminded of the time I tore the fiberglass top off my Volkswagen Vanagon in a parking garage, I just stood there in shock screaming, "Fuck, fuck, fuck....!!!" because I had no one to blame but myself.  And this is the kind of feeling I get from our current era of gutless art; we have no one to blame but ourselves for: Bush, for 9-11, for Osama Bin Laden, for Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City, for Waco, for Iraq–we have seem the "man behind the curtain" and it is US, all of us in the west who drive and eat and curse war, and complain when the price of gasoline is too high.  Art is on the edge of artlessness, it seems artists need to– at least on some level– understand the stuff we make art about, and when distilled down we, as artists, make ourselves to, about and in our time–and both our time and understanding currently seem hazy at best.

Where is the edge?  Well, it sure is not in the gallery.  How can "fine art" compete seriously with the likes of Jackass, Survivor, and The Gulf War part II on the reality TV front, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-MEN, The Hulk, Spider-Man, or Finding Nemo?  Matthew Barney dug in and fell off the spiral of the Guggenheim seeming never ‘real' enough.  If I had an answer I would not be writing here.  I find ghosts in my house and making a substitute popular culture in my own head my only pathetic art cope. What is yours?