Fintan O’Toole: Coronavirus is like the Taliban – it hates art

A viral Taliban has taken over the country. Covid-19, like many mass killers, is a fanatical puritan – no dancing, no music, no unholy images, no festivals. It has devastated cultural life.

Over 12,000 events have been cancelled. Over the last two months, 2.4 million members of the public have not had the experience of attending a cultural gathering they would otherwise have participated in. And this is not a short-term shutdown.

For the foreseeable future, venues will not be able to host audiences in sufficient numbers to make events viable. Many arts organisations – surviving on a wing and a prayer at the best of times and now deprived of revenue from ticket sales – are in real danger of disappearing.

Yet there is far more evident concern about when the English Premier League will return to action. Maybe this is, in part, because Irish artists and performers are too good for their own good.

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They are too used to making do, to improvising their way around the poverty of the national artistic infrastructure. Too good at smiling when they win international prizes and Ministers, who have no real interest in what it takes to get to that level, muscle in on the glory. Too good at filling the gap between the nation's self-image as a powerhouse of culture on the one side and the reality, on the other side, that public funding for the arts in Ireland is among the worst in Europe.

And, since no good deed goes unpunished, the sheer resilience of Irish artists and performers has been their own worst enemy. Governments always know that, in the end, no matter how bad things are, the musicians will play and the painters will make images and the actors will perform.

They will work for starvation wages because they are driven by a need to create. (Even before this crisis, 72 per cent of artists working in Ireland were earning less than the national minimum wage.)

But not this time. The elastic is long and tough, but it has now snapped. Willpower and drive and need are no longer much use. Artists and performers, because it is what they do, have responded to the coronavirus crisis with extraordinary generosity and spirit, making their work available online for free. But this is the lipstick on a pig of a problem; live performance as we have known it has been vaporised.

All the physical festivals, from Galway to Listowel to Kilkenny to Borris to Dalkey, from Electric Picnic to the Willie Clancy – gone. The theatre shows from basements and cafes to the Abbey, Druid, the Gate, the Project – gone. The traditional sessions in pubs – gone. The concerts in Glór and Siamsa and the National Concert Hall and the Olympia and the Cork Opera House – gone. The Wexford Opera Festival – gone. Whether it's Riverdance or avant garde modern dance, rap or cabaret, it has disappeared.

Rescue fund

The loss is both calculable and incalculable. On the one hand, every town and community in Ireland can count the financial cost of losing events that generate income for local businesses.

But the long-term impoverishment of the quality of Irish life is not so easy to calculate. It is evident as an absence – you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. The hunger for collective cultural experience is all the more powerful when we have subsisted for months on the limited diet of the virtual. That hunger will grow as we begin to emerge form lockdown and seek both meaning and mourning.

We know from an Arts Council survey that artists and arts organisations have lost about €20 million in the shutdown. That's both a huge sum and a paltry one. It's the lifeblood of the cultural ecosystem. But it's nothing in the context of the tens of billions of euro the Government is being forced to pump into the economy. So the first and most obvious thing to do is to give €20 million now to the Arts Council as lifeboat money. It should be an emergency rescue fund to keep arts organisations from going under.

Secondly, artists want to work. It should be made clear that the Pandemic Unemployment Payment is, for artists, not really about being unemployed. What has happened to artists involved in live performance is not that they are not working, but they can’t display the fruits of their labour. It is surely right that performers who have lost their income due to the cancellation of events should be supported in continuing to make new work that will surface whenever that becomes possible.

Thirdly, Government planning for social and economy recovery needs to address the urgent question of how performance can be possible in a post-Covid-19 world.

If, for example, the Abbey can now safely seat 30 per cent of its previous audience, that’s 150 people. The intimate space that had a capacity of 60 now has fewer than 20. The festival tent that held 500 will hold 150. Those numbers are simply not viable. The whole idea of what a venue is and how it works will have to be reimagined. Artists will do that eventually – but only if they survive long enough to be able to reinvent performance.