By Glen Helfand

PHOTO COURTESY OF GAVIN BROWN'S ENTERPRISE, NEW YORK

These dispiriting last two months of the year – with a pall of disappointment, portents of change, and the deaths of icons and institutions (from Yasser Arafat to possibly the Castro Theatre) – seem to have almost obliterated the energy of the 10 months that preceded them. The same wave of distraction has pushed away the serious sense of alarm raised by this summer's felony charges of fraud (thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act) leveled against Steven Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble as he addressed the topic of biotechnology in his art. (If you want a refresher, go to www.caedefensefund.org.)

In a similar sense, I can barely recall the winners of the Bush in 30 Seconds video contest. The spots didn't make a mark on the public's consciousness as effectively as the more expensive, spin-doctored TV counterspots employed by the incumbent. And MoveOn is now licking its wounds and questioning strategies along with dozens of other organizations that entered into a political dialogue with new methods. I somehow miss the daily flurry of e-mails from Eli Pariser and all those Democratic National Committee flacks who began to seem like online pals I'd never met in person. It's amazing how within weeks – with a deadline past and an election outcome that's so difficult to reconcile – we've lost a sense of urgency and the constant media presence of John Kerry, he of stiff phrasings and hairstyle.

But in thinking back on art images of 2004, Elizabeth Peyton's portrait of the candidate as a young man, John Kerry, April 1971, embodies some of the year's visual issues. Like all of the artist's paintings of fey heartthrobs, types found in Britpop bands of any era, this one has a watercolorish, fan-based ethereality in its poster-boy depiction of sensitive masculinity. (This was also the year that metrosexual made its dramatic crash as a buzzword, one that was briefly attached to Kerry.) Peyton's depicts Kerry with piercing blue eyes and a semi-kempt mop of dark hair. An acoustic guitar wouldn't seem out of place in this image of lost – or perhaps fictional – innocence, evoking a belief in idealism, in peace, love, and understanding. I would much rather recall Kerry in this rosy light than look toward the balkanizing fingers of blame that have been pointing toward the now-vacant campaign offices. But with each passing day, Kerry's persona will more thoroughly recede from memory and pertinence.

PHOTO COURTESY OF GAVIN BROWN'S ENTERPRISE, NEW YORK

Peyton's painting, which was exhibited in election-themed shows in New York City and widely published in art magazines, fit right into the artist's emphatically personal work. It doesn't exactly look political and stands a chance of holding some ground in her oeuvre. This season there's a gleeful, albeit fleeting, urgency to the series of posters that mocks Apple's highly visible iPod ad campaign by holding on to the brightly colored backgrounds but replacing the silhouetted figures with the iconic hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner and other images that stem from the land of insurgents. The new tag line: iRaq (plus various now-outdated casualty figures). The posters, downloadable in high-resolution versions at www.forkscrew.com, were brought to my attention by a young artist who's grappling with similar issues in his own work. A sleekly designed product that's ubiquitously coveted, the iPod is apparently the gift to impress this year in the industry. Such inevitable parody propaganda offers the appeal of rerouting cultural and advertising symbols with swift, economical acts. We wish we'd have thought of it ourselves and hope we're the first on our block to get a T-shirt with an iRaq figure printed on it.

The posters are a form of street art, freely distributed images, while Peyton's canvas is an object with firmer roots in the art world – although the iPod itself stems from the world of alluring industrial design and, in theory, would've fit perfectly in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's supremely disappointing "Glamour" exhibition (through Jan. 17). The show, which to my mind, held the promise of timely cultural critique while implicating visitors in the consumerist desires we're groomed for from birth, never even picked up the ball to engage that latter charge. It's essentially an exercise in upscale window-shopping and evaporates from the mind on contact.

On the other hand, I can't shake Chris Finley's bizarre, semiabstract images inspired by Bush's first cabinet members and Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, whom he depicts as stylized moths fluttering around their leader and a blood-sucking tick, respectively. In his show at Rena Bransten Gallery (through Jan. 8), Finley playfully expresses the ways current cultural forces insidiously burrow into our minds. That act of processing the zeitgeist is what I yearn for in art, and if not art itself, the scenario is the urgent subject of Sore Winners: (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America (Doubleday), critic and L.A. Weekly columnist John Powers's underacknowledged and extremely entertaining look at how reality TV, big box stores, and SpongeBob SquarePants have come to reflect "a time in which hysteria has replaced politics and consumption passes for social action." And if it makes a difference, I'll call it the best piece of popular culture I've encountered all year.