Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Ken; According to The Guardian, the lack of support for the creative community is harming the development of our most effective weapon against unexpected situations like Covid-19 – the arts.
We need to stop punishing artists: their creative thinking will help us out of this crisis
Esther Anatolitis
Tue 28 Jul 2020 14.02 AESTWhat’s needed now is an ambitious national vision that invests in arts and culture comprehensively
As everyone keeps telling us: we’re in unprecedented times. And unprecedented times call for unprecedented thinking.
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What’s the No 1 skillset needed for the workforce and economy of the future? A wealth of global research, from the World Economic Forum to PWC, Deloitte, McKinsey, Nesta, Harvard, and even the Australian government’s Bureau of Communications and Arts Research agree: it’s creativity.
Why have we been so unprepared to deal with Covid-19’s challenges? Because “we really lack creative imagination”, Osterholm told Sales. Despite repeated warnings, he continued, we’re told by politicians that “no one could have envisioned – or so they say – all the constellation of things that have happened here: not just a virus crossing from an animal to a human, but the worldwide transmission, the impact that it has on healthcare, the fact that it also shuts down our global economy”.
If “no one could have envisioned” the inevitable set of possibilities that experts have been outlining in detail, then contemporary governance is in big trouble. Because the capacity to envision a complex set of possibilities is fundamental to good governance.
It’s also, of course, the fundamental skillset of the artist.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jul/28/we-need-to-stop-punishing-artists-their-creative-thinking-will-help-us-out-of-this-crisis
I value art, some of my friends and business associates are artists, and I love what learning a bit of art has done for my life. I thoroughly recommend everyone do an art course, just for the experience. But this demand for extra government assistance to rescue those who are allegedly society’s foremost problem solvers is just absurd.
Right now artists have a captive audience of millions of really bored people stuck in lockdown, staying at home with nothing but an internet connection, a regular payment from the government and endless free time. Surely there is some kind of opportunity right now for truly creative artists to reach out to their audience and make some money.
Good God!
I confess that I was very involved with the arts, as an artist, for decades, and this is the most ridiculous, impractical heap of crap that I have ever read. It gives some artists a bad name.
Strike that — I disavow ever having been associated with the arts. They are dead to me, if this is the current outlook
Speaking, …………… as an ……….. “artist”, ……….. delusion is the new beauty.
Stupid is the new intelligence.
Masks are the new religion.
Hypocrisy is the new integrity.
Woke means every problem, real, not so much or thoroughly contrived, can be solved by increased funding for some murky progressive notion.
Amazing.
Wow! Just think, we have the answer right here all along, just get the artists to fix it, what were we thinking?
I suggest the artists set up a think-tank and sell their brilliant ideas….problem fixed. Market forces rule, if you have a great idea, sell it to us. If you want up front payment for nothing, then that is a different matter, the answer to payment for nothing is, fuck off. That’s your market forces at work.
Show us your brilliant ideas, I am breathless with anticipation.
So we are going to turn to starving artists in order to find a way to fix the climate models?
Don’t get me wrong, by the way. My wife and I are regulars at the opera, ballet, symphony, live theater, and other live events. We both miss them greatly. We also missed baseball (go Cubs go!) until just recently. MLB has been very innovative in bringing that back – and as a for-profit enterprise, one would expect that.
I know that nothing is less of a motivator for artists than direct financial reward, but they do have to live. One would think that they would turn their creativity to coming up with ways to do that, and perhaps this is it: hitting us up for cash on the off-chance that one of them would come up with a way of “solving” the pandemic.
The person in the cover photo strikes me as a performance artist of some kind. If so, it’s a poor example. They are (with the exception of musicians) some of the least creative people around. They do what some writer or choreographer told them to do; perhaps very well, but with no originality.
That is unless the Covid-19 pandemic can be solved with…interpretative dance.
To symbolize the plight of the current era, I propose to do an installation piece using corpses of people whose death was attributed to COVID-19. I will glue the corpses, individually, to appropriately sized plywood panels, which I will call “dead-body panels”, and then I will suspend these panels at various heights, using strong hanging wire, to fashion a mobile hanging from the ceiling. Each panel will also have a large chime attached, to serve as a bell in a giant dead-body wind chime, for which a large fan will provide the necessary air currents to cause them all to ring. The resultant pleasant sounds will, thus, be juxtaposed with the horror of death, eliciting memories of past times in the face of a current crisis of fear.
Okay, that’s my National Endowment for the Arts grant opening paragraph. What d’ya think?
That’s a slam dunk, Robert.
Robert!
If I was in charge of other peoples money, you would be first on my list of proposed recipients.
I am trying to imagine someone, similar to Marcel Marceau, demonstrating how to beat COVID-19.
The arts as they currently exist, exist because of the leisure society powered by hydrocarbons.
Before the industrial revolution the large majority in all countries were farmers, farming small plots with large families. Zero time for Arts, as a result the only artists were supported by the small wealthy elite.
I grew up in western sask in a small town, born 1965.
There used to be a farm with 6-8 kids on every section of land, and towns every 7 miles as limited by transportation technology, ox cart.
Now 10 sections is a small family farm, most of those town are long gone
And everybody crowded into the cities
And sneering at those living in the country even though with out those sparse country people the entire web of roads pipelines power lines food production etc would collapse in days
And poof goes the arts
If we revert to subsistence farming the millions involved in fashion will die off immediately
And they aren’t smart enough to realize it
You couldn’t want for a clearer demonstration of a collective lack of creative imagination than what is shown in the vast majority of comments here.
Obviously, any government funding for anything must be stopped immediately – that’s Communism! Marxist-Leninist propaganda! The entire world must follow the highly successful US model – Guns! Flags! Russians! Idiots! Liberty!
90% of art is self indulgent crap and I wouldnt give it a penny.
As a former arteest devotee, I agree.
Love the Left. If not for them there simply would not be a Silly Season this year.
Yep, the Black Death was finally cured by injecting three operas, two concerts and a poem into every city in Europe.
Weird … it is 4 AM and I’m thinking, “Well OK then! Whether they’re funded or not, The Creatives of the Art world should be brimming over with deliciously avant gard ideas … right now …. right?”
Right?
In other words, no matter what the time of crisis, it is not some anodyne ”funding” that powers those-with-the-answers to emit those brilliant flashes; they are tried, and if they work… well, they catch fire. Right?
And this is where I am listening, intently.
No fire. No mass of good ideas. No spontaneous combustion. No nothing.
Sorry, folks.
Nothing to see, move along.
Drop your billions at the door on the way out!
Why don’t they employ some of that creative thinking to get themselves out of the problem?
Hardly seems like a great advertisement for their powers of creativity if they need government handouts to survive.
++ simple clean logic.
The most creative idea the arts and their champion spokes paper can come up with is ” Give us some money”
Now that is what I call deep philosophical thinking right there. Very creative so arty.
Where would we possibly be, without such radical concepts as begging who could ever come up with such a novel idea as that other than the artists?
I am an artist and a scientist with university training in both. One of my lectures is “Art, Science and Models” Where I explain the difference between art and science and that models, until they are validated and show predictive skill, are just hypothesis – more art than science. The point of the lecture is to demonstrate the massive failings of human progress that occurred when leaders allowed belief and imagination to overrule the principles of science (lysenkoism, Maoist agricultural reform, eugenics and the holocaust, millions of children dead from malaria because of superstitious fear of DDT, burning of “witches”, Spanish inquisition…). Creativity is a fine trait but, if not restrained by the rules of rational thought and scientific analysis, it is more often a source of disaster than success. I love art, but I don’t use it to solve problems any more than I use calculus to paint and draw (actually I don’t use calculus to do anything as I forgot all of the principles long ago).