According to most Americans right now, there are two kinds of art. There is the literal, figurative kind, a sculpture of a woman falling, for instance, to which they respond, "I get it," followed immediately by "and I don't like it."

Then there is the abstract kind, a great big rusted steel slab by Richard Serra, for instance, to which they respond, "I don't get it," followed by "and I don't like it."

So here's one way things have changed since Sept. 11. Americans have never liked art they didn't understand and now it appears that after the World Trade Center attacks, they don't like understandable art either.

One can be sympathetic or not, depending on one's taste. I detest Serra myself, although I think his talent as a maker of roadblocks or iron patches for aging oil tankers has been underestimated. I was pleased in the 1980s when furious Manhattan office workers got rid of his 124-foot Tilted Arc. Serra called it "site-specific." They called it an "eyesore."

Figurative painting is a joy. I am attracted to genre painting since I love domesticity. One can love David Hockney's appealingly mundane photo collages while still being hugely impressed by Francis Bacon's thin monsters poised on toilets. Dailiness and horror are equally recognizable and appealing.

Yet my favourite artist is Howard Hodgkin, whose abstract "infinite riches in a little room" paintings seem to mean everything and nothing. His scarlet and green swathes, splodges and dots are usually given a name like Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi,though they could just as easily be called Fresh Air for my Tumour.

But my point is that you used to be able to count on Americans for a good sneer at this sort of thing. Whenever they were confronted in an art gallery by a pile of bricks on the floor entitled Untitled,they'd froth and splutter. Somebody would say, "I like a painting of a gal with a head. Preferably on her shoulders." Then an art student would protest-vomit on a hand-highlighted $25,000 piece of Thomas Kinkade junk, and good fun was had by all. It's an American tradition, like Mark Twain saying the old masters should have labelled their fruit so he wouldn't mistake their pears for turnips.

But two artworks that referred to bodies falling from the WTC have just been hauled away in New York for offending people. And for once, I'm the one saying, "I don't get it." The first was an Eric Fischl sculpture called Tumbling Woman.

The second was a gallery's window display of paper silhouettes of people falling. It resembled the kind of homemade snowflake cutouts your third-grade class stuck on the windows every December. Israeli-born artist Sharon Paz said plaintively, "I didn't mean in any way for it to be offensive or insensitive." Or even interesting, Sharon?

After decades of complaining that modern art boasted no evidence of skill and offered no meaning, Americans are now complaining the art they're shown is too recognizable, too accurate. Art distills sensation, Jacques Barzun said. But genuine sensation offends Americans jaded by special effects and sugared by Hollywood sentiment.

Only two years ago, then New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was complaining about the British artist Chris Ofili using elephant dung to render the Virgin Mary. As dung goes, the elephant kind is actually rather nice, being made out of salad greens. But had Ofili used brown paint and portrayed Mary as a golf ball with a halo, i.e. looking nothing like Jesus's alleged mum, he would have been home-free.

As it was, Giuliani didn't even notice the most offensive -- and I think, brilliant -- work, the painting of Myra Hindley, a British woman who helped torture and murder children. Her face was rendered in the handprints of little kids. It was extraordinary. But they weren't American murders. Foreign things don't register with Americans and they ignored the painting. This was the first case of Americans not getting something that was perfectly gettable and thereby missing an opportunity to say, "And I don't like it."

Literal art, as opposed to figurative art, is often boring. The new Tate Modern in London has a lot of simpleminded stuff amid vast expanses of chipped white drywall. When I last visited, Chris Ofili had sculpted a head out of elephant dung. The title of the sculpture? Shithead.

Now that's literal.

We have been overprotected from the consequences of terrorism and war. If Americans had been allowed to see photographs of the oozing faces and crushed torsos of their fellow citizens, they might well have objected to the same violence being done to Afghan children. I recently saw on a Web site the half-severed heads of Israeli soldiers killed by Palestinians, and was so profoundly shocked that I am now wildly in favour of peace negotiations between all groups of humans. That's what literal representation did to me.

We are now at the point that there doesn't seem to be any art -- figurative, abstract, badly sculpted, well-articulated, stumblingly stated, startling or subversive -- that Americans will admit to understanding and liking, or will even tolerate.

How pathetic. Art is one great civilizing force they could use right now.
hmallick@globeandmail.ca