Writer: JG Ballard

“I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.” (JG Ballard, 2004) argued the British novelist James Ballard.  I have been researching in the with the assumption that this statement is true, namely that art is an important forerunner to social and political change.

If Ballard's statement is true; public opinion is a catalyst to political and social change.  This would certainly seem to be the case in democratically based governments.  The former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago suggested that; "Democracy, finally, rests on a higher power than Parliament. It rests on an informed and cultivated and alert public opinion." (Eric Eustace Williams 1938).