Suppose the International Freedom Center, which is now a dead letter thanks to Governor Pataki’s intervention last week, had actually been built. Can you honestly say you would ever have wanted to go there? Would anyone, beyond those of us who visit for the impure, mediated reason of seeing what was done at the site?

The cause it would have enshrined – the expansion of freedom throughout the world – is surely a noble one, but it is unlikely that so vast and vaporous a theme could be treated in any compelling way. And if attendance fell, as it probably would have after the initial novelty wore off, would there not seem to be something insultingly dreary about the whole affair, about the busloads of schoolchildren, restive and resentful, who had to be brought in to hike the attendance figures? If I may suggest an invidious comparison, the ethos of the entire project would probably have been a little like the speeches of Bill Clinton, the interviews of Bill Moyers, the poetry of Maya Angelou. You know: earnest and ennobling, infinitely edifying, and, well, boring.

At the risk of sounding tedious myself, the overarching problem with ground zero and its present impasse concern our culture’s strange and even unhealthy relation to questions of meaning in recent years. For a variety of complicated reasons, the present age is obsessed with, enamored of, the idea of meaning – even more than with meaning itself. From recent French philosophy to dance, painting, music, and, most of all, architecture, text has taken over every arena of culture. We love to think that we have something to say, something so urgent as to take precedence over the dictates and amenities of form.

Art shows and architectural exhibitions are awash in text that buzzes from monitors, that spills over from wall panels. Daniel Libeskind’s original and ungainly Freedom Tower needed to be 1,776 feet tall and to recall, in its torqued shape, the Statue of Liberty. In the same spirit, and for the same site, Raphael Vinoly and the Think Team aspired to construct two huge lattice shells that would serve as “skeletons” of the vanished towers, while Norman Foster, in a spirit of mid-cult togetherness, conceived of two faceted towers that could be seen “kissing.” Form and function, which were quite enough for earlier generations, are inadequate, even irrelevant to us now. We have stood on its head Archibald McLeish’s famous dictum that poetry – and by extension all culture – “should not mean, but be.”

Yet the meaning that the current age requires has to be a constructed meaning. It cannot simply emanate from the architectural act; it must be orchestrated and contrived. And, of course, it can only be one’s own meaning. This is especially hard to achieve in the present circumstances, since no two constituencies – and there are hundreds of them at ground zero – can agree on anything. The confusion is only confounded by that rich and typically American vein of sanctimony, victimhood, and passive-aggression whereby each constituency seeks to gain the ascendancy over all others.

The quest for meaning has created further confusions. Remember the recent unpleasantness at the Drawing Center, which was supposed to settle somewhere on the WTC site and may yet do so? Certain family members of the victims of September 11 objected to a recent show containing at least one work about the attacks that was considered, with some justice, to be anti-American in sentiment. Here you witnessed the collision of several paradoxical aspects of contemporary culture: the need to mean, the need to “speak truth to power” (which is seen as meaning par excellence), and, at the same time, that strange desire of “vanguard” art to win the blessing, through subsidies, of the very powers it presumes to oppose.

The Drawing Center, which is a generally worthy and responsible institution, took exception to the protests that greeted its show. But there was something a little disingenuous about that response. The curators and director must have known they were running a certain risk. And like so many other cultural institutions, they must have understood the value of a bit of controversy to their bottom line. Still, the protests brought to light the difficulty that any cultural institution faces as long as it is seen to be part of the official response to September 11. Quite aside from having to articulate a message that no one can agree upon, it finds that the vanguardist meaning implicit in most cultural projects at this late date is incompatible with the official meaning it is expected to express.

Eventually, we may confidently suppose, the question surrounding the development of ground zero will resolve itself. The most pragmatic solution would be to let the native forces of New York’s supercharged urbanism take over, influenced surely by some master plan. That may be happening already.

Now that the freedom center will not be built, there is suddenly talk about developing retail in the area. To some noble souls, this will seem like a desecration. But life itself – of which buying and selling are an essential part – has something sacred and valuable about it, and the sight of people going about their business once again would communicate a rich and natural rather than confected meaning. That may well be the best that we can or should hope for at ground zero.