How will the arts capture the pandemic for posterity? Will the age of destruction and death lead us into new creative beginnings, marking perhaps a time of new enlightenment? Or will it rob the arts of their abiding quality—the ability to create lasting memories? The past two years of our shuttered existence has thrown the world of artists into a disruptive loop. Art that once engaged people in galleries, theatres, auditoria and other such spaces is now being served up on a screen, adapting (or not) for a work-from-home audience. And the experience, which was once a collective and participatory act, is now individual and exclusionary.
In many ways, this is a transformational moment, in the way artists think about
