What can art do? What role can it play when the whole world seems suddenly unstable, unsure?

At first, the Great East Japan Earthquake and the tsunami that followed sent the Japanese art world into a kind of stunned silence. And that was understandable. As artist Tadanori Yokoo told me in July, "I couldn't work for about a week after the quake. I was too busy checking on friends and the news."

After that initial period of shock, however, many artists, and others who make up the "art industry," went through what appeared to be a bout of self-doubt. The question I heard time and time again was "What can art do?"