Imagine for a moment a world without art and culture.
Without music without cinema, without dance, opera, literature, poetry.
The art that is engaged with society at large.
And engaging also with the key issues that affect us all today, because that is the art that matters.
That world would be a very very dull place, devoid of imagination -- the one thing that distinguishes us as human beings from other species.
Without art the banality of reality would be intolerable.
Or to paraphrase Nietzsche, we have art in order not to perish from the truth.
Today more and more artists are inspired by reality then by the formal properties of that reality as we know them.
Colours, shapes, beauty - they strive to provide a counterpoint to the prevailing images of power and also the stereotypes that are fed to us by the media.
Art is in a sense political as it is about a person's views and freedom to act, freedom to express themselves.
What does art do? What can it do? And why is it important?
The fact of the matter is that it is very very difficult to pigeonhole and categorize what exactly art is and how it functions.
That is its beauty and that is its ungraspable value for want of a better word.
It is impossible to both quantify and qualify how art affects those who see it.
The value that is the importance, the significance and the merit of art cannot be judged by popular consensus and numbers alone.
It’s a subtle power that changes the world one perception at a time, is very often seen and rightly so as a threat by the powers-that-be.
Art is about one person's expectation of and their use of their own freedom to act.
Art is optimistic because it makes a statement, that one person can change the world, even if that world exists on a tiny piece of paper 5 by 7 inches.
More importantly art is the last frontier of unregulated free expression which is particularly important at a time when the commons, public space, and information are increasingly being privatized and regulated by the new liberal order.
In that sense art is born of and advocates freedom.
Artists always see a world full of opportunities, chances, potentials, possibilities, and prospects.
Their ability to go beyond the possible and into the imaginable should be an example and an inspiration for us all.

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