It's a commonplace that one of the defining qualities of our era is speed. Paradigms shift in the course of a year. Cultural fashions change overnight. Email is instant. Time flies. This truism has seemed truer than ever in the nine months since September 11th.

Military victory in Afghanistan, such as it is, occurred more quickly than anyone expected. And now the cleanup at Ground Zero is finished - much faster than the experts thought possible. Billions of pounds of rubble have disappeared. Which means that we're going to have to start answering, right now, the profound questions of exactly what to make in that 16-acre crater.

The mayor of New York says he wants to launch an international architectural design competition for the rebuilding at Ground Zero. The art world has debated what should be done with the remains of Alexander Calder's bright red 25-foot-tall sculpture called Bent Propeller. Should it be restored? Or exhibited on the rebuilt site wrecked, deformed, as is?

And artists everywhere have been producing new work prompted by the attack. The composer Jeffrey Cotton had his office right across the street from the World Trade towers. And in the week right after the attack, composed his Elegy for String Orchestra. In the following weeks and months, hundreds of artists around the country - and the world - created 9/11 works and posted images on web sites, like the WhyProject.org.

In Seattle last month, local artists mounted a group show called the first war of the new millennium. And starting this September 11th, the School of Visual Arts in New York will open a big exhibition of art by the school's faculty about the attack. The New York Philharmonic commissioned the composer John Adams to write a piece of new music. It's called On the Transmigration of Souls, and its libretto is based on the famous air-to-ground cell phone calls on 9/11.

Can good art really be summoned up on demand like that, nine days or even nine months later in response to cataclysm?

No one heard Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem," the most splendid musical response to World War II, until the early 1960s, sixteen years after the war had ended.

Maya Lin designed her extraordinary Vietnam War memorial long after Americans had fled Saigon, and Robert Motherwell didn't even start his "Elegy to the Spanish Republic" paintings until a decade after the Spanish Civil War was over.

This got me to wondering about the timing of the most famous piece of art in response to a single attack of the last century. It was inspired by a staggeringly vicious aerial assault by evil monomaniacs on thousands of innocent civilians. One spring day in 1937, Luftwaffe bombers killed and wounded 1600 in northern Spain in the town of Guernica.

And just three months after that, Picasso finished his masterpiece, Guernica, and it hung on the wall of the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair in Paris that summer. Although it's important to point out that back in 1937, most critics didn't think very much of Picasso's picture.

So out of the nightmare of war, great art does come, and come quickly - but that doesn't necessarily mean that we will be quick to appreciate it. Particularly while there's a war going on.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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