Art is not art when it is cowed into silence; when the artist looks at the state of the world and doesn't wonder what to make of it but instead wonders if there's a point to making anything. Art in spite of trying times, indeed art because of trying times, is art in its highest form. No story is bettered by the author's silence, and no reader's mind is enraptured by the absence of story. Create, and never stop creating!