Lockdown: closing the door on culture

It has been over a year since UK theatres and performing arts venues more or less closed their doors to the public due to the Covid pandemic. Art galleries and museums had a moment of re-opening to the public when restrictions eased up over summer 2020, with the proviso that face-coverings were worn. Visitors had to book in advance online, leading to much reduced numbers. Major museums such as Tate, the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum had a massive 78% drop in attendance in 2020 compared with 2019.

Since mid-March 2020 to the present day, I can count on one hand the number of cultural events I have attended, all of them exhibitions during that small window of partial freedom between July and October 2020. No live music, theatre or cinema. As someone who has fairly recently gone freelance as an arts professional, without the safety net of furlough, I’ve been forced to rely on self-employment grants and universal credit. As a result, I’ve had to cut my cloth and it was with great regret that I was forced to cancel my Odeon Cinema, Art Fund and Tate memberships. I am not alone in having to review my cultural outgoings. The Royal Academy reported a loss of 18,000 Friends since lockdown, a loyal fanbase that would normally automatically renew their annual membership.

The financial losses for the cultural sector are enormous, as they are for vast swathes of the UK’s economy. Pleading that shopping is far more dangerous than attending an exhibition will not hold favour with the general public as they review their personal expenditure weighed against loss of earnings. Did we all instead satisfy our appetite for culture through streaming TV? In April 2020, Netflix reported a surge in new subscribers announcing that it had 15.77million new paid viewers across the world. But by October 2020 it added fewer new subscribers in the third quarter of 2020 than at any other point in the past four years.

Clearly, the excessive restrictions and continuous tiered lockdowns enforced by the UK government is taking its toll on the British public, the leisure/hospitality industries and on cultural institutions, both public and private. The battering we have received by government-imposed social distancing measures, face masks, and the erosion and over-policing of social and public life have worn us down. The novelty of online performances and exhibitions has quickly worn off and have exacerbated isolation.

The result is a psychic withdrawal. We are tired of the endless passive staring at the two-dimensional surface of the digital realm, the atomised imprisonment within our homes. This is not the ‘new normal’ we want, especially as vaccines are successfully being rolled out in the UK. But the year-long, fear-inducing tactics by the state have indeed made us feel a sense of unease and trepidation as we begin to step back out into the real world.

Passports for culture

A YouGov poll revealed that 55% of people think that vaccine passports should be required when we are allowed back into cinemas. Theatres are desperate to re-open and therefore may submit to the possible imposition of requiring punters to show Covid Status Vaccination Certificates as a means to relax social-distancing measures and instil public confidence to start booking tickets for shows. As one major theatre producer puts it, despite highlighting the logistical chaos that implementing a vaccine certificate would entail, ‘in the haste to get our lives and industry back, a vaccine passport programme for live entertainment must be delivered from the outset with the upmost care and clarity’.

Thankfully, not everyone in the culture sector wishes to embrace a possible ‘Covid passport’ scheme. The National Museum Directors’ Council’s response to the government consultation made a principled point that ‘using a Covid-status certification scheme as a basis for access sits at odds with the public mission and values of museums’. The industry body for cinemas, the UK Cinema Association put out a statement that it ‘does not believe that it appropriate to ask someone to prove they have undertaken a medical procedure or to undergo a medical test to access what is supposed to be a place of entertainment and enjoyment’.

Stifled by safety

Governments across the world and health officials have created levels of paranoia that I have not seen in my lifetime. Often on my social media feeds, I read of people feeling anxious about life getting back to normal; they fear the crowds, noise and bustle. It seems like we have pulled the shutters down on public life itself. It was right to exercise some degree of precaution and prevention during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic before the vaccine rollout, but now we have a cause to embrace a re-awakening, a regenerated verve and spring joy knowing that a third wave of Covid-19 cases is looking highly unlikely.

However, there is another greater concern. Great art thrives on taking risks, pushing against the boundaries of social norms and imaginary borders. While institutions should welcome the Government’s £1.57 billion Cultural Recovery Fund that has helped 2,700 cultural and heritage organisations that are being offered nearly £400million in grants and loans, they should not lose sight that the arts are also a site for danger, unease and uncomfortable experiences and thought. Press release after press release from cultural organisations now talk in a therapeutic language about ‘care’. For example, Liverpool Libraries’ new scheme to tackle loneliness and improve mental health through virtual meet ups, where you will ‘not be expected to read anything, if [you] don’t want to, [you] can just join the session and chat to someone new and have a laugh’. This ethics of care in the arts in order to create a ‘Covid-secure’ environment should not be the primary focus for arts institutions nor artists.

Even in the territory of radical live and performance art, producers and curators are adopting a precautionary principal at a time when it seems highly unnecessary now that the UK Covid rates are the lowest in Europe. From enforcing the wearing of masks, temperature checking audiences, imposing physical distance and the authoritarian threat of vaccine certificates, it’s time the venues and arts curators/producers stuck two fingers up to these impositions by the state.

A lust for art

Glimmers of hope exists, echoes of the speakeasies of Prohibition America, where performance companies are creating a new underground scene of illicit events. Last summer, I had the privilege of experiencing HUNCHtheatre’s adaptation of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time at a disused health centre (a rather apt site considering our wellbeing obsessed culture) in north London. Strictly invitation only, about 30 spectators threw caution to the wind, shaking hands, kissing, hugging, drinking, no masks or social distancing. It is these acts of defiance and rebellion from which we must take inspiration and embrace our lust for life and art.

Manick Govinda

Independent arts consultant, writer and artists’ mentor

Manick Govinda is a freelance arts consultant, and was formerly programme director at SPACE. He is an associate consultant for Counterculture LLP and has worked closely with a range of artists for many years as a producer, advisor, mentor, curator, strategist and fundraiser.

He is also a freelance writer and campaigner on free expression and on arts and freedom of movement issues. He has written for spiked, Index on Censorship and All In Britain. He runs arts campaigns for the Manifesto Club, where he led the campaign against the UK government’s visa restrictions on non-EU artists and academics. He also helped co-found Artists for Brexit and the Brexit Creatives.

Follow Manick on Twitter at @manick62 and Authory (authory.com/ManickGovinda)