It’s coming. The date is less than a fortnight away. 20 January is a day for the history books – the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. How to mark it? A day in bed with a bottle of tequila and some seriously depressing country music sounds about right – and in a sense that is what some of America’s most admired artists are proposing.

I am not saying Cindy Sherman, Julie Mehretu, Richard Serra, Joan Jonas and 130-odd other US art giants will be getting drunk under the duvet, but they don’t propose to do any work that day. They also urge museums and other cultural institutions to lock up and go home for the day, all of it a “J20 art strike” in protest against “the normalisation of Trumpism”.

Emotionally, I completely sympathise. Why leave it at one day? A four-year strike in which we all simply give up everything – wherever we happen to be on the planet – for the duration of Trump’s term as president would feel entirely justified. The accession of this manifestly unqualified man to the most powerful office in the world, with one finger on the nuclear button while he types out tweets with another, makes everything seem futile.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An art strike “is at best a way of saying ‘not in my name’, and cannot conceivably do anything to curb Trump or ensure his electoral defeat.” Photograph: L.E. Baskow/Reuters

Yet an art strike is just about the least effective idea for resisting Trump that I have heard. The American left is in for a long, wretched period of irrelevance if this is its idea of striking back. I admire some of these artists greatly, but the notion that museums will help anything by closing their doors, or students will scare middle America into its senses by cutting art classes, tastes not of real hard-fought politics but shallow radical posturing by some very well-heeled and comfortable members of a cultural elite. These eminent artists come across as people who are used to being listened to without having to try. Worse, there is something nostalgic about the petition, as of this were the 1960s all over again. Some hope.

Such a protest can only help the participants feel good about themselves. It is at best a way of saying “not in my name”, and cannot conceivably do anything to curb Trump or ensure his electoral defeat next time around. Let’s face it: art and serious culture are completely marginal to American life. Trump’s victory proves that. Closing museums is not likely to have any impact on those who support him. With all due respect, they might be affected a lot more if reality television shows went on strike.

From their safe citadel of artworld fame, these venerated creators appear to be inviting museum curators and art teachers to take risks with their livelihoods. An art strike at this time could be a personal risk for individual members of staff . It could be unnecessarily provocative for institutions themselves to declare themselves as political enemies of the new administration. That’s not to say people should never take such risks when it is the right thing to do, just that it is a little bit arrogant to ask this of others when you yourself risk nothing – and anyone familiar with incomes in the upper reaches of the art world knows the likes of Sherman and Serra really do risk nothing by taking a day off.

The cultural world is right to be horrified by Trump, but what can it really do right now? Nothing. Meryl Streep’s comments at the Golden Globes were eloquent – and she rightly put herself on the line, instead of others – yet nearly as pointless as an art strike.

There is something inadequate in the way the liberal world characterises Trump. A woman-hating racist representing the US would be bad enough, but there are much more unprecedented and seriously frightening aspects to the man: his volatility, open dishonesty and signs that he has no respect for or understanding of democracy itself, not to mention his strange relationship with that authoritarian enemy of western freedoms, Vladimir Putin.

The real reason art strikes and fine words at the Golden Globes are futile is that they cannot do justice to the danger the world is in. Liberals, this is not an opportunity for radical grandstanding. History has chosen our generation to be tested. Save your strength – you will need it.