Here Is New York

Last Sunday night, a steamy 90 degrees in the city, everyone I knew in New York was glued to the new series of Sex and the City, to study what is one of the crucial barometers of the emotional climate for New Yorkers.

In the first episode Charlotte, the former downtown art gallerist, is described as being "caught between the old and new York". It's a nice pun on her surname (York, evidently) but, culturally speaking, it's got New York's state-of-the-art summed up to the letter.

There's an obvious desire to see how the city has changed over the past year through its art. After all, New York art was always so responsive to social upheaval. From the mid-Eighties, for example, the art community was profoundly affected by Aids and spoke articulately of the crisis. The works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, charting his slow demise through Aids combined with touching moments of intimacy, for example, have become notable symbols of that responsive moment. By contrast, one of the traditional end-of-season group exhibitions on display at the moment is called Penetration. It's pretty much self-explanatory and hardly profound (although occasionally profoundly hard). These days, it's sex without the politics.

Perhaps there are no politics left to articulate. New York might be in denial. Either the effects of 9/11 haven't filtered through yet or, as one artist told me: "In the Eighties, it was us and them. Those distinctions don't work now." Today it's not enough to rail against the Establishment. "The enemy isn't visible."

The gallerists seem to be putting up a business-as-usual front, curtailing their summer vacations in the Hamptons long before the traditional Labor Day on the first Monday in September, to have their new season's shows up and running at least a week before the 11 September anniversary.

On the other hand, there's huge cultural investment going on downtown around Ground Zero. Moukhtar Kocache runs the visual programming of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). He's working hard to bring artists back to the district around the disaster site with a programme called Looking In, and plans to animate the area with a series of public projects and residencies, including mixed media work that will be conceived and installed on site. There's also a project at what they call Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) in Brooklyn. It's not Lower Manhattan, but the idea was "to look at the neighbourhood and examine it from across the river".

After all, 9/11 generated such enduring images that are all linked to very particular locations from where they were taken. Perhaps the strength of these images is precisely why artists seem so inhibited and unable to take the tragedy full-on. I recall paying a visit to a painter's studio in the Lower East Side last October. I climbed the seven flights and, reaching the studio at last, remarked breathlessly on the spectacular view.

"Look over there," she gestured. "Between those two buildings." I told her I couldn't see anything.

"Exactly," she responded. "There's nothing left to see. Nothing to say."

And it's so hard to talk about an absence. For an artist, by definition, it's taxing to represent something that's no longer there in an image or an object. Here Is New York (www.hereisnewyork.org) has accumulated an unmediated array of hundreds of images from Ground Zero, mainly by people not working as professional artists. (Prints are for sale and proceeds go to support families of those lost on 11 September.)

One of the LMCC's initiatives, on the other hand, is a collection called Microviews, documentary material made before the fall of the Twin Towers by some of the 140 artists who had studios in the World Trade Center. Kocache is adamant that these are not artworks, but provide what he calls "an alternative portrait of that space and the loss".

Right next to the spectacularly grim absence that is Ground Zero, artists and curators are finding a place for themselves among the empty shop fronts and abandoned spaces through the LMCC initiative, which will bring at least a part of the moribund shopping district back to life from next month until January next year. But, less than a mile away, the Lower East Side is beginning to develop as a new art centre, already abuzz with a handful of young, lowkey and edgy new galleries.