Christo, the renowned Bulgarian-born wrapper of islands, parks and other landmarks has become the latest artist to protest against Donald J Trump’s presidency. Christo became a US citizen in 1973, and has been working for 20 years to develop one of his most ambitious projects – and that’s saying something – in the American west. He proposed to erect six miles of silver-coloured fabric over a Colorado section of the Arkansas river for two weeks. The immigrant from postwar communist eastern Europe believes in paying his own way, so it was going to cost him $50m. It has been a tough struggle – not least because environmentalists have opposed his plans.

So shocked is Christo by Trump’s election that he has now abandoned his dream of covering up a Colorado river. The artwork would have been put up on federal land; “I can’t do a project that benefits this landlord,” he says, referring to Trump.

Like the J20 Art Strike and Richard Prince’s recent denunciation of a work he sold to the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, as a “fake”, Christo’s protest – the weightiest yet, by one of the most revered artists of our time – raises questions about how artists should protest against what they rightly see as a dark turn in American history.

I think it is a mistake for them to withdraw their work in the way Christo has just done. Such gestures will not harm Trump. If no art gets made or shown in the US during his presidency, he and his supporters won’t even notice. The loss of works like Christo’s will, however, rob those who need its power – from younger people who can be inspired by art to Trump dissidents who might be nourished by it.

I’ll go further. Art is the easiest way for ideas and emotions to cross borders. As Trump seeks to build walls and make entry into the US harder for huge groups of people, art is one thing that can sneak through passport control and keep a human dialogue alive between the US and the rest of the world.

For contemporary art as we know it is an American invention. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, Cindy Sherman – no art made today is free from their influence. Not only that, but the American voice in art is overwhelmingly liberal, progressive, libertarian, radical, as all the artists mentioned above exemplify. While Christo’s roots are in Europe, his installation on the Arkansas river would have put him in the great American land art tradition of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field and James Turrell’s Roden Crater – and would continue his own hymns to the American landscape, including Valley Curtain and Running Fence.

Is it perhaps the fear of looking like an all-American artist, celebrating the grandeur of the west, that makes Christo worry? It is not just that he would be working on federal land with Trump as his “landlord”. He would be drawing attention to the beauty of the US at a time of “America first” bigotry.

But Trump does not own what the US is. He does not own the artistic tradition that has so richly responded to the open spaces of the US, from the Hudson River School in the 19th century to the landscape sequences in Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle.

Instead of walking away, sulking for four years during Trump’s term, going on strike or just collapsing in depression, American artists should work harder than ever to offer their alternative, generous, imaginative vision. This land is your land – it is not some Trump golf course. Why can’t Christo do his sensational artwork, then denounce the new US president in interviews? Culture is always, in and of itself, the enemy of tyrants and fascists. If Trump is the danger to democracy that many fear then culture must raise its voice, not fall silent.

Christo and other artists who wonder how to protest could do worse than read Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus. Mann was one of Germany’s leading liberal voices in the early 20th century. The Nazis burned his novels and he went into exile in 1933. In Doctor Faustus, which appeared after the second world war, he writes an extraordinary bittersweet love letter to German culture, from the music of Bach and Beethoven to the sickness of nationalist intellectuals. It is driven by a conviction that culture keeps us human.

Mann describes the Nazi nightmare “the dictatorship of the scum of the people”, but his book is full of love for the best in German culture. If he could feel all this after seeing his own books burned, how can American artists fall silent at the start of Trump’s mischief? Art must never silence itself. Such a so-called protest betrays all the brave artists and writers who have defied the book burners of history.