When did you feel art is important?

Answer: when I was in Kindergarten, if not before. Seventy years later, I still am involved in liking and making art. It ain't distant from my life.

Whom do you suggest is a platform for the good Arts?
What one person find just wonderful, someone else might not even want to look at.
As pointed out already before or during kindergarten children play with colours the way they like. A sun might be black and the sky pink. That is how
a child feels at that moment (or maybe that was the only pens avaiable)
Often a grown up will correct and say a sun is yellow and a sky is blue.
At school kids will be graded for how artistic they are, not so much for how they feel about art. You can have deep feelings for art without being artistic and you can be seen as artistic without being creative.
I felt for a painting in a newspaper when I was around 3 or 4 and it was framed and hung my wall and still do. My personal first very happy meeting with art.

I remember painting on what to me was a big piece of paper held on a child's type easel - in Kindergarten. I can still almost closely visualize those paintings.
So cool! (I didn't know that word then, cool, but the doing (painting) and the pleasure of looking at it (them) are something I can still find in my mind's eye.

Playing with colours I think is so important.
I still have all the drawings I made of the Nordic Gods and their world.
It certainly is in no way artistic, but full of details and made with lots of fantasy.
I also remember very well the nasty art teacher who forbid me to make a mother´s day card as I had no mother. I still made it and gave it to my great
aunt who was taking care of me and my father.

I'm happy for you.

If it's not too personal, may we know what painting that was that made such an impression on one so young that you have it to this day?

This is the painting I fell for as a little girl.

When the first illiterate stalking horse was shod with its first sock puppets and imagined it should talk.

and u would know all about sock puppets...

I recall, in kindergarten, Sr Mary Consolata, introduced us to the art work of Winslow Homer, Rockwell Kent and then some local artists like Ben Austrian, Ralph Dunkelberger, even more modern local artists like Charles Demuth,Charles Sheeler, and David Baziotes.( Baziotes became one of my teachers for a year or two before he died in the 60's). I went nuts over how these artists all shared the"flat" medium of paper or canvas but totally different ways of creating their personal reality.
I started talking about art at suppertime and was encouraged by my folks (Except my father thought that artists were always broke).

I havent moved much pst my obsession with some of these artists work, except I added a few renaissance guys to my list.

ART'S TOO IMPORTANT TO BE CONSIDERED MERELY "IMPORTANT", whether its music, sculpture, or installations, Its reality interpreted . Im gonna hate it when the arts default to "artificial intelligence" and people start to believe in it.

all the timeeeeeee

It makes the life more colorful.

I don't understand the OP. Art is everywhere, in songs we hear on the radio/internet, in grafitti on the walls, in the books we read, in advertisements, in museum, and of course on the Internet. It ain't hard to find.