Art Post Covid

I am writing this as we are in the midst of another lockdown in UK and almost a year of our global Covid reality, with everything prior to March 2020 feeling like an innocent utopia around which we were blindly hurtling. A sort of technicoloured Roman Empire, if you will, before it all came crashing down. While our pre-Covid culture was primarily driven around our egoic needs, the current global pandemic is a sobering equaliser from which no-one has escaped unscathed or unaffected. While it is true that the disease has inevitably struck down the poorest, most vulnerable, neglected and exposed communities, it has created shock waves across all socio-economic bands and age-groups, transgressing national borders.

At the same time, this unique and unprecedented situation has made us reconsider the crucial role of community and of the need to come into balance; the need to relate, to empathise, to address social injustice. Dare I say, some of us have started perhaps to properly appreciate the importance of inter-reliance and solidarity. Seen through this lens, it is no coincidence that the fight against racial inequality and the push for much needed societal diversity, have found a new impetus and potency.

This is where art can have a powerful place and a potent purpose. It enables us to dream, to tell stories, to imagine; while at the same time it can hold a mirror up to both our personal and collective experience, whether the very mundane or the very profound. Art is our juice, our medicine. It offers an opportunity for us to make sense of, to question and to live intimately with our reality, while at the same it is the springboard from which we can transcend it. The whole painful and beautiful mess of it.

So, what of Covid’s impact on the art world? The pandemic has affected the livelihoods of artists and artist collectives; the institutional sphere of museums and universities, lecturers, scholars, curators and students; the commercial platform of auction houses, sales galleries, buyers and collectors; and the audiences, art loving public, tourists and visitors. The outlook is glum, with the disastrous economic scenario looming large. Many museums worldwide have closed their doors, some have recently reopened, but with little forthcoming in the way of large-scale traveling blockbuster shows. Access is with prior booking made essential, masks to be worn, specific entrance and exit times, designated circulation routes; and no family workshops or community outreach projects; no tours, no printed maps and guides so as to reduce touchpoints.

So, a reduced opportunity for enrichment and targeted learning. No more events for school children, the elderly and harder to reach communities; and a rather more mechanical experience than we have been used to. This, in the context of a substantially reduced income stream that has required museums to make job cuts. When the TATE in London re-opened its doors after the first lockdown, it faced protests from unionised staff who accused the museum of acting favourably towards upper level management while axing lower-band jobs. It is undoubtedly true that statistically, staff facing cuts by museums are those who were already on lower pay-brackets, such as front-of-house ticketing clerks, cloakroom assistants and tour guides, who lack secure employment contracts and have less financial stability. Such is the way the cookie crumbles: history on repeat.

Those galleries that have decided to place their exhibitions online are dealing with the challenge of presenting a three-dimensional, multi-sensory experience into a two-dimensional format. The result is diluted and solitary. Artworks are presented via a flat screen, accessed from the hum-drum of our domestic environment rather than the buzz of a gallery. The technological glitches and delays make the process of viewing an exhibition online more akin to the clumsy navigation of google maps street view- there is no sense of space and scale, none of the echoes, vibrations, the amusing or intriguing flotsam and jetsam of other people’s conversations and comments. From an audience’s perspective, the act of going to see an exhibition is a profoundly social activity, and is often tied to the urban experience. It is as much about seeing other people and being seen, as seeing the art on view. This is all a by-product of the 19th century, the rise of the middle (leisure) classes, and the establishment of entire buildings that were specifically designed to house collections open for public viewing. There is none of the ‘energy’ of the space and the weight, density, or scale of the artworks cannot be appreciated. It becomes difficult to witness how the art inhabits or vibrates within the space or how the space envelops the art, to judge how artworks react to others nearby. Single artworks listed on websites lack any kind of cohesion or story binding them together, the lack of curatorial vision or coherent narrative make for a rather piecemeal and bitesize snack rather than a five-course feast. The concept of a ‘pilgrimage’ made to see art for the purpose of ‘enrichment’ (whether spiritual, cultural or material) is completely done away with.

At the level of commercial industry, the major art fairs that have monopolised the annual calendar for so long, such as Tefaf and Frieze, have all been cancelled and migrated online. Overall, art sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips’ auctions have fallen a whopping 97%, despite the success of their online auctions in June 2020. Christie’s restructured its entire organisation merging its contemporary, impressionist and modern art departments in a bid to cut costs. The Venice Biennale was postponed until this year and has been re-imagined instead last year as a live-streamed multi-disciplinary exhibition online. Commercial galleries have taken a huge hit in sales, from which many won’t recover. Even the largest blue-chip galleries such as Pace, and David Zwirner have laid off employees, and Gavin Brown announced he would be closing his eponymous gallery and joining Gladstone as a partner.

What impact will this have on the art of the future? Will there be more self-taught artists? Freed from the burden of having to live up to any institutional expectations or to any historical and reputational mantle, will the artists of the future be from lower-income, less privileged backgrounds, more women perhaps, fewer men, more old and less young, more blacks and less whites?

In many respects, just like so many other aspects of society, the art world was already bloated, skewed and dysfunctional. The crazed throngs necking champagne at blockbuster gallery openings now seem absurd and kind of obscene. As do the over-subscribed, competitive and over-priced university courses, and the millions spent on huge travelling international exhibitions. Not to mention the millions spent on single art works at auction. Covid has merely accelerated the urgency for much-needed change, for transformation. Artists working during the pandemic seem to have fallen broad category of those being wildly productive and those lacking any motivation, zeal or inspiration. Many have had no access to their studios, no space in which to create or no opportunity for working in a collective space with other artists and to exchange ideas and information in a physical setting. Some have had to change their working methods, many have had to adapt their homes and kitchen tables into studios and hence changed their preferred scale and their media, while others have confessed to revisiting old works and reworking them, with this slower pace of life affording them an invaluable opportunity for reflection and re-appraisal.

There are sure-fire signs that change is already afoot. In my local neighbourhood, the community centre put a call for artworks to be made and presented outside people’s homes on the pavement for public viewing, a kind of pedestrianised outdoor exhibition. Pieces of people’s lives made manifest and taken from inside their very private homes out onto the street. Will the art world finally become more democratic, more bottom up and less top down? In an effort to collaborate and support each other, museum professionals in certain parts of the US have rallied around to crowd-fund and raise money in order to protect the loss of fellow museum worker’s jobs. Museum online is an Instagram account growing in popularity to showcase artworks from private and personal collections. A company that makes printers has devised new technology that enables the download and printing of artworks direct from Google in exceptionally high quality for placement on walls at home. That stands the entire concept of needing to pay for and acquire art on its feet. Perhaps more sculpture parks and outdoor installations will emerge, owing to the need to keep social distancing measures in place.

Despite my skepticism about the online art viewing experience this does not seem to have deterred others, who have been keen to access their favourite museums online- many museums, such as the British Museum and the Courtauld Gallery in London have reported soaring web traffic. People are as keen as ever to consume art even if from their living room. More and more commercial galleries are creating unique and thoughtful content such as live round-table discussions and presentations with their artists via Zoom, creating opportunities for their collectors to gain a more in-depth and enriching experience, rather than simply enabling them to shop online.

In this brave new world, museums and institutions need to reconsider their role beyond and outside the physical space of the gallery. Now more than ever, it is crucial that they don’t become mausoleums for artworks. They need to think of how to enable a direct and powerful transfer between art and viewer, they need to take the art outside of their physical walls and into the eyes, worlds, homes of their audiences, and to enable those audiences to shape their content. Those institutions that have permanent collections are already focusing their curatorial efforts on those, finally doing what they have always longed to do, but never been able to because they had cow tow to the pressure of creating sexy foreign content and paying huge sums to present blockbuster exhibitions comprising works from museums abroad. Curators are finally given carte blanche to study the art that is already there under their noses rather than the artworks shipped at great cost from a museum far away. Now at long last we can have a deeper and perhaps authentic experience, less exotic and more real, more about quality less about quantity. A museum in Rotterdam has cleverly conceived a new kind of exhibition, the first of its kind, a ‘drive through’ exhibition. The Royal Academy in London which is perhaps not ordinarily known for its grass-roots approach to connecting with communities, have turned their social media twitter into a daily doodle challenge, thereby creating a more authentic exchange with its audiences. More museums are going to have to place content creation into the hands of the public rather than keep it held within the closely cupped hands of curators.

Without being too preachy or patronising, it is our collective responsibility to revitalise and seek out and create a new world of art, a new art world. I think we kind of owe it to all those who have been impacted by this pandemic. We don’t have to be artists, curators or collectors to make that happen and to rise to the challenge. Creativity is everywhere and is inherent within all of us. Art’s capacity to override sickness and death isn’t new and has been written about countless times- just think of the story of Shahrazad from the Arabian Nights. She outsmarts her husband, the bloodthirsty king who was in the habit of killing his wife each night and marrying a new one in the morning, by telling him a story each night before he goes to sleep, ending each tale on a cliff-hanger in order to maintain suspense to keep her husband hooked, and herself alive. To put it bluntly, art: art is the one means through which we will be able to come through this particular episode in history, winning.