I could not disagree more. My visceral response (beyond becoming more politically active) has been to dive back into the studio. To work in any medium of art be it poetry, painting or drama is to essentially to encounter the unknown and wrestle meaning to light. When I face chaos, tragedy and fear in my life I will use the studio as a place to organize and create a path forward. This is why I believe in the power of art as therapy. I know that it works.
The current show at the MOMA on the Russian Avant Garde art movement speaks to the power of change - revolution reflected and exacted through art. It is both exhilarating and chilling to see as the likes of Rodchenko, Lissistky and Eisenstein rejecting imperialist styles of art in favor of a new abstraction without formal constraints that could represent the will of the common man. There is so much freedom to these images speaking to a new spiritualism after the oppression of centuries of Czarist regimes. The cautionary tale is how they then became enlisted as brutalist motif for a most brutal form of totalitarianism under Stalin.
For good or evil, art is more than just a mirror of the times. Artists must imagine new forms of seeing. With politicians and journalists using language like "we must draw out the possibilities" whether about health care or relations in the Middle East, this is no less a time for artists to be active and imagining the way forward; the way to wrestle meaning from the complex unknown of our world.