What does art do?

Talking about art in Saigon got me thinking about art in general. How artists are treated is a pretty good barometer of where a society is headed. And from what I ve been reading over the last couple of years, India isn't doing so well in that respect. First, they drove MF Husain out of India, then some right wing idiot rolled up at at Baroda's prestigious fine arts university and attacked a student artist. If you thought they would arrest the right winger, well what do you know, they arrested the student instead..this was in 2007.
Even now, when I visited, I found the pluralistic Hinduism I knew had slowly but surely given way to various shades of Hindutva--a very curious and spurious mixture of fascist methodology and puritanism.
There were things that made me hopeful, a few reviews of new art and artists; women trained in traditional dance presenting contemporary modern pieces where once there was only orthodoxy--these things were encouraging.
Historian and critic John Berger has a wonderful explanation that tells you why art is important. (I found all his books in a second-hand book shop in Bangalore and was therefore reminded of him)
"I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour."