Alex Boyd writes at the Northern Poetry Review about just that. NPR is a great site to which all hungry young essayists and reviewers should be clamouring to get in. Flood them with your suggestions for pieces and reviews.

The reality is that society and art depend on each other. Society provides basic needs and funds special projects. At the very least, allowing people to pursue things in free time without requiring they spend every waking hour on survival. In return, some people provide creative contributions. There’s always a veritable river of bad art, and even good art can’t easily have a measurable, provable emotional value, so critics who see art as irrelevant are always there too. But I believe society exists for people, not the other way around.

Another mistake I made as my belief wavered was to forget that there are quiet heroes, so overshadowed on the day of the attacks: those parents that loathe the job but love the family, and go to stand on the subway platform every morning even though they feel they die a little, each day. These are people who make a tremendous difference in the world. They are not exciting enough for Hollywood to turn into films most of the time, but they are still sometimes sung about (Fanfare for the Common Man, by Copland, comes to mind). They are responsible for a great deal of good in the world, for the anti-headlines we never see: millions of people didn’t murder anyone today. And the fact that their individual actions are not as striking or as loud in volume is hardly a fair or logical comparison.