Art & Creativity Quote by Ben Okri

Okri draws a clean line between two kinds of power: the power that manages reality and the power that remakes it. Calling politics "the art of the possible" flatters it with craft and pragmatism, then quietly cages it. Politics, in this framing, is a negotiation with limits: institutions, voters, budgets, violence, time. It is skilled precisely because it must bargain with what already exists. The phrase also carries a faint warning: the political imagination is structurally conservative, even when its slogans are revolutionary, because it survives by counting what can pass.

Then Okri flips the prestige. Creativity becomes "the art of the impossible", not as escapism but as insurgency. The poet is not bound to what a committee can approve. Art can draft new emotional constitutions: it makes the unthinkable legible, the unsayable speakable, the future feelable. That is why the "impossible" matters. It is the staging ground where cultural change rehearses before it becomes policy. People rarely vote for a world they cannot first picture.

Subtext: Okri is defending the seemingly impractical labor of artists against a culture that treats them as ornament. The line insists that creative work is not a luxury adjacent to public life; it is upstream from it. Politics governs the present. Creativity governs the horizon, smuggling radical possibility into the collective mind until the impossible starts to look, inconveniently, like the only thing worth attempting.