Regarding the question in what ways artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Coco Fusco who is an artist writer and currently working as an associate professor, she firstly criticized the question for its narrow parameters because Afghanistan invasion and other ethical matters are excluded from the war. However, she also said that Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal raised more response than the Iraq war because of its circulation of the photograph. Here she also made a noticeable comment that "it is easier for Americans to understand that torture is unethical than it is to comprehend the political intricacies of the international terrorism and the insurgency in Iraq" (Fusco 2008,p-53).…show more content… Okwui Enwezor, is a curator, art critic, and senior vice president at San Francisco Art Institute and Coco Fusco both agreed that response has been very week and tamer. Coco Fusco broadly described reason behind this limited and soft response, she mainly claimed that embedded media, censorship, and patriot act are the main reason, she even compared the response of visual art with the other forms of art, especially film and theater. Marita Sturkan's notion of comfort culture is also applicable to this soft response, " the culture of comfort in the United States permeates political discourse, social imperatives, and consumerism. It is a primary mechanism through which the project of U.S. imperialism is made palatable to the American public. It is also a primary mode through which the U.S. practice of torture is mediated" (Sturkan 2011,p-423). Ultimately response to Iraq war and other invasions of U.S. got a mediation and culture of comfort permeated this, Okwui also said in his feedback that "the war has been successfully depoliticized" (Enwezor 2008,…show more content… Fusco also expressed her opinion that Steve Mumford's paintings and An-My le's photos and video installations are embedded with American troops. Though she and Okwui Enwezor appreciated McQueen's work, and Okwui mentioned Coco Fusco's performance art. "I have not seen the manifesto-like gestures that intellectuals and artists made during the Vietnam war" (Fucso 2008,p-59), Coco Fusco said this in her feedback regarding comparing the Iraq war protest with Vietnam war. Here to response, this Okwui firstly argued that public sphere is totally indistinguishable from the entertainment sphere, he also mentioned extreme paranoia about "Islamofascist". Regarding this response argument Judith Butler's notion of ethical response is pretty relevant, in his article Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag he said, " my point, which is hardly new but bears repeating, is that whether and how we respond to the suffering of others, how we formulate moral criticism, how we articulate political analyses, depends upon a certain field of perceptible reality having already been established" (Butler
