Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis

The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Being an artist and writer, I end up hanging around with some fairly bohemian types. Recently I was drinking wine late into the night with a couple of petite lesbian schoolteachers, a Parisian dominatrix, and the Japanese actress who owns the Hokkaido nightclub 'Pussy City'. God only knows what we were talking about--I remember an endless round of discussion about introducing sympathetic men into all-female sexual relationships as a way of avoiding masculinized role-playing, and there was some far-fetched plan to launch the first international simultaneous orgasm.
My own thoughts were far away, and it was a relief when I finally got them all out of my little pied-á-terre in the city at about 2:00 AM, the schoolteachers being particularly clingy for whatever reason. I had things to think about. Are we as a species really on the razor's edge between salvation and destruction? How does this impact the creative spirit of our generation? And is there any significance to my recurring dream of being forced at gunpoint to gum a crepe wool beard onto Mother Theresa's corpse?
These thoughts swirled around and around in my mind like thoughts swirling in a large mind-shaped bowl. Are desperate times always upon us? Can humanity produce great works in the face of despair? For example, if Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony (in honor of which they retired the number) whilst losing his hearing, which most composers would call a setback except possibly John Tesh, is this not proof that the biggest obstacles in life are also the very peaks that greatness ascends? That is, if you like Beethoven. Turk Shapiro, who headlined the Salamander Club in Atlantic City for thirty years, never let the loss of his pinky finger during a cocaine-snorting mishap stop him from crooning the Klesmer version of 'Strangers in the Night' six evenings a week plus matinees. Thomas Kinkaid is legally blind and yet has become the top-selling painter in human...