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Not to get overly dramatic, but the art world these days increasingly feels like that scene in Dr. Zhivago where Rod Steiger puts the moves on Julie Christie in a fancy restaurant while the Bolshevik revolution erupts in the streets.

At the gala opening of the ADAAs Art Show on Feb. 22, for example, it was a little too easy to forget that full-fledged civil war is breaking out in Iraq and that the current administration still hasnt a clue as to what we should be doing there.

Of course, you cant blame an art fair for not keeping up with current events (especially one with such a high-end bent), but its a problem when it comes off as a well-decorated fall-out shelter.

A pair of solo shows in two of the boothsGregory Crewdson at Luhring Augustine and Alex Katz at PaceWildensteincaptured this isolationist mood precisely. Katzs latest series features a lone man walking serenely through the woods, turning his back to the viewer and to the world. Crewdsons staged photographs are well-known for their movie-style depictions of alien invasions, as if all impending disruptions of the American dream are merely the stuff of make believe.

Escapism, it seems, is the order of the day.

In the art worldnot to be confused with the real world its okay to revisit the 20th century through Steichens, Hoppers and de Koonings, without reopening the wounds of wars, racism and mass migrations. And its taken as erudite to relieve contemporary artists of the burden of political responsibilityand ultra-cool to eliminate revolutionary-ness from ones definition of an avant-garde.

What do you want? More of that didactic, political shit? hurled an esteemed art critic at me, when I raised this issue at a panel earlier this year.

It seems that didactic has replaced derivative as the dirtiest word in contemporary art.

At the Art Show, there were only two moments that hinted at a world of trouble beyond this rarified realm. At the Maxwell Davidson Gallery, a photograph by Neil Hamon, with the elaborate title James McCarrol, John McClaren, Chris and Denise, Chance Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and US Infantry, Persian Gulf, 1991, showed a troop of soldiers engaged in conflictalthough not the current conflict in the Middle East.

The other moment? A young, black artist wandered the aisles wearing a dove atop his woolen cap.

When I asked him if this was a peace symbol, however, he handed me his business cardhis name is Damion Dreherexplaining that no, this was an advertisement for his show opening on Feb. 24, but he was open to all interpretations.

I liked the dove floating above the artwhen I thought it was a silent protest. But the response seemed all too typical of most artists that I have interviewed about this matter: noncommittal at best and self-promoting at worst, using the fears and crises in the world to lend a free-floating gravity to feather-weight projects.

Thomas Hirschhorns recent installation at Barbara Gladstone stood out because it was a uniquely expressive outcry in the midst of the timidity of this seasons art works, and I was glad to see it managed to win supporters. Just a month earlier, however, Hans Haackes show at Paula Cooper was criticized for being too overtly political and therefore too out of place in todays neo-psychedelic art scene.

Still, there may be some signs of hope.

As I write this, artists Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija are busily assembling their Peace Tower outside the Whitney Museum, as part of the upcoming Biennial, a recreation of a work raised in Los Angeles in 1966 to protest the Vietnam War.

And the Armory Show, taking cues from the near-documentary tone of the film nominees for this years Academy Awards, may reflect the recent shift in American culture towards a bit more protest in its entertainment by showing a few more artists with a political bent.

But, with the Art Show in one armory and another bearing the name armory in its title, it is good to remember the original Armory Show, whose organizers picked its location to pointedly take aim at the armaments industry, even as they waved the banner of modernist aesthetics.