oil in the mind

Theatre critic and poet Alison Croggon writes:

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is small beer besides the three-decade environmental catastrophe in Nigeria, where equivalent oil-spills occur every year.

Croggon asks:

Shall we continue fiddling as Rome burns? Or are we doing something else?

She continues:

I'm not stupid or vain enough to think art can save the world. But those who denigrate art are even more stupid than those who proclaim its vanities: it is imagination that has created our entire human reality.

The problem is that art's power exists only in its truthfulness, and truthfulness is not the lingua franca of power