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To go on we have to find a pattern in our responses to trauma

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To go on, we have to find a pattern in our responses to trauma. Audiences need the questioning clarity of art; artists need to create new structures from pain "Cashing in" will depend on the artist's integrity. On 11 September, 11 members of the photographic agency Magnum were in Manhattan: all took photographs. What would 11 top photographers have done in New York but take photos? And now the book has come out.

"If something upsets me," the photographer Helmut Newton told me once, "I get my camera out. I believe that if a photographer has a camera between him and horror, he can face anything.""In a peculiar way, for artists, this is the best as well as the worst of times," the theatre director Deborah Warner said recently "We have a terrible thing to draw on There'll be new energy My feeling after 11 September was to return to the theatre It's a very safe place." That's the response to Tom Hanks Art does protect and heal. Sometimes it's the only place where you feel safe.On 11 September, however, art was made unsafe, too. Art, under attack along with everything else, was abused; even stolen. When video-artist John Maybury saw the second tower hit, he recognised an aspect of his art: "What I was seeing was artfully done. The first plane got our attention, so we'd look at the second." The planes were a video-installation, with the world as audience.The music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the 73-year-old experimental composer, has long incorporated elements of theatre and spectacle.

He has followed Duchampian aesthetics, searching for metaphorically violent ways of thrusting image and sound together. His 1994 "Helicopter Quartet", based on a dream he had of "towers of television screens", thousands of outdoor spectators and musicians in flying helicopters, was creepily prescient of 11 September as a live spectacle. Inevitably, he responded to the attack in those terms, as "the greatest work of art there's ever been. That people rehearse like crazy for 10 years, totally fanatically for one concert, and then die! Compared to this, we are nothing as composers."Faced with fury and outrage, Stockhausen later said he was referring to the "Luciferian aspect of art", but his comments also show that late Modernist ideas of art, privileging spectacle and "happening", are stale; that they must change.Different arts will change differently as they move beyond 11 September. They will change because that day was destruction, the antithesis of creativity. And making something new, good, bearable out of destruction is what creativity is for.The fall of Troy, of the "towers of Ilium", is tragedy's first metaphor of human fragility – and changes in design are obvious. "More emphasis on safety," says Frank Gehry, architect of Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum.

"More technical discussion of how to get people out of tall buildings fast," says Cecil Balmond, the designer-engineer of iconic buildings throughout the world.Others may take longer Art offers safety because it takes risks. Nicola Lane, a London artist whose work is currently touring in the Arts Council exhibition Adorn, Equip, says she felt guilty about taking a magnifying glass to photos of people jumping from the towers, "but I had to know the shape of their bodies in the air" That's her job. Art has to risk knowing appalling things, to draw constructive conclusions from them.But risks can backfire. The earliest Greek tragedy we know of was written when Persia was the global super-power.

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