We like to think of ourselves as bold people, game people, people hard-wired to take risks.

During the 1990s in particular, when every bozo with a dot-com scheme considered himself an entrepreneur -- I was one of those bozos, I'm afraid -- embracing risk was pretty much the name of the American game. Only losers were afraid.

But in fact, back at the height of the internet bubble, most of the economic risks people took didn't actually feel very risky. Because success looked so easy and failure seemed like no big deal, since there was always another new thing to invent, more capital to raise, more stocks bound to double and triple. During the internet bubble, the risks felt like risks in a dream -- interesting and exciting, but not actually scary, since in dreams you can't get hurt no matter what crazy stunts you pull.

Today, that giddy sense of voluntary universal risk-taking has disappeared. During the last year or so, risk has gotten a bad name.

But just because we're now conscious of taking a risk every time we get on the subway or take a plane, it would be a shame if the creative among us shrink from the risks that make life interesting.

This occurred to me when I was talking to a friend, an executive who produces TV shows for the big networks. She told me she's never seen network executives as risk-averse as they are right now. What they want, she says, more than ever before, is the easy and bland and familiar.

Of course, the television industry has pretty much always runs on fear -- fear of low ratings, fear of alienating advertisers, fear of losing high-paid executive jobs. And so 95% of TV executives at any given moment say yes to the easy and bland and familiar and no to the unusual and risky.

But what about contemporary art? Aren't fine artists supposed to be the genius contrarians, our dreamers of odd and beautiful dreams, the culture's designated risk-takers?

Looking over the catalogue of the huge international art show Documenta, which is held every five years in Germany and opened last month, I was struck by the overwhelming predictability and uniformity of the artists' vision. There are 400 pieces by 180 different artists in Documenta, but most of the art seems staggeringly similar, as if it were all produced under the auspices of the same progressive ministry of global culture somewhere. It's nearly all "serious" in the same one-dimensional way. It tends to be photojournalistic and documentary. And it's about Third World border wars, rotting cities, poverty, pollution, persecution, and political murder.

It's dispiriting that the Hollywood television factories seem to be redoubling their commitment to producing treacly, unchallenging stories full of conventional uplift and standard heroes.

But it's just as dispiriting that the international art establishment seems determined to produce nothing but grim, unchallenging images full of conventional horrors and the standard villains.

Both the TV industry and the fine art industry are preaching to the converted. Both seem single-mindedly devoted to their particular, rather narrow bandwidth of received wisdom. Neither seems to have any real desire to upset its core constituency -- in other words, to take risks.

Art and entertainment are the realms where we really can and must continue to take risks -- and where the easy answers, even if they feel good to give, are seldom the right ones.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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