[ad_1]
What is art’s function? What does art do for a person, a country?
Scholars, economists, revolutionaries keep debating, but one very good answer has held now for 2,500 years. The function of art, Aristotle told us, is catharsis. You go to the theater, you listen to a symphony, you look at a painting, you watch a ballet. You laugh, you cry. You feel pity, fear. You see in others’ lives a reflection of your own. And the catharsis comes: a cleansing, a clarity, a feeling of relief and understanding that you carry with you out of the theater or the concert hall. Art, music, drama — here is a point worth recalling in a pandemic — are instruments of psychic and social health.
Not since 1945 has the United States required catharsis like it does in 2021. The coronavirus pandemic is the most universal trauma to befall the nation since World War II, its ravages compounded by a political nightmare that culminated, last week, in an actual assault on democratic rule. The last year’s mortal toll, its social isolation and its civic disintegration have brought this country to the brink. Yet just when Americans need them most, our artists and arts institutions are confronting a crisis that may endure long after infections abate.
Professional creative artists are facing unemployment at rates well above the national average — more than 52 percent of actors and 55 percent of dancers were out of work in the third quarter of the year, at a time when the national unemployment rate was 8.5 percent. In California, the arts and entertainment fields generated a greater percentage of unemployment claims than even the hospitality sector. Several hundred independent music venues have closed; art galleries and dance companies have shuttered. And in my own life, I’ve listened to painters and performers weep over canceled shows and tours, salivate over more generous government support in Europe or Asia, and ask themselves whether 2021 is the year to abandon their careers.
“Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people,” said Harry Hopkins, the first supervisor of the Works Progress Administration, when an official in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration queried whether artists merited federal employment. Art, music, dance and theater are social goods, but also individual professions — ones more endangered than at any time since the 1930s, and facing lasting damage even as the pandemic abates.
The effects of this cultural depression will be excruciating, and not only for the symphony not written, the dance not choreographed, the sculpture not cast, the musical not staged. Beyond value in its own right, culture is also an industry sector accounting for more than 4.5 percent of this country’s gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
[ad_2]
Source link