We can understand art as a process of bringing something into the world that was not there before, it can be an artifact but it can also be an idea. That process, Professor Elaine Scarry calls a fragment of world alteration, and so if we can alter the world in fragments, she says, "just think what can be imagined together, what might be possible in community: a total reinvention of the world."
Thou hast made me known to friends
whom I knew not;
Thou hast given me seats in homes
not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and
made brothers and sisters of strangers.