On starting to tell the story of now
Ever since the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty said that we should expect to maintain social distancing for a calendar year I’ve been mentally cycling through what that might look like for us at Tate and other creative companies I’m involved with. Whether you interpret him as meaning this calendar year or, as I do, a full 12 months from now, the point is that there will be profound changes in how we operate for a long time to come.
While we wait to understand how our public spaces and cultural buildings might reopen I keep coming back to the question of relevance: how are we relevant to our audiences right now?
There is no doubt that people are looking for art and creative content to distract, entertain and inspire them — work from museums, artists, theatres, authors, musicians all bringing comfort and connection. There is a huge swell in creative output from people on social media, sharing their work or renewing their own creative practices, from online choirs to crafting and making.
It goes deeper than this though. Covid-19 has lifted the lid on many of the inequalities in our societies and also exposed the generosity and compassion of our communities. It has led many of us to re-evaluate what is important to the fabric of our society, what we want from brands, companies and governments. The pandemic has affected every country on the planet, yet its impact is felt differently at the community and individual level. It is both global and hyperlocal, it inspires fellow feeling while we keep each other at (at least two) arms’ length. It highlights our common humanity while putting how unequal our lives are into sharp relief.
So how do we, as cultural institutions, tell this story of now, while it is happening? How do we make ourselves inclusive and accessible to communities hardest hit by this pandemic, particularly low income and BAME people who are not well represented within our sector? Who tells these stories, how and how do we share them?
This feels urgent to me, because as well as creatively responding to the situation we are in right now, there is a chance here to create stories that explore who we might become. Art and stories that help to articulate who we are now as a society, what is important to us as communities, families and individuals, how we want to be governed, and how we will hold ourselves, our institutions and our leaders to account.
The challenge of working out the logistics of how we will reopen our buildings is daunting, huge and complex. But the challenge of how we talk about now is one we can start, well, now.
Cultural institutions have a significant role to play in helping us all to understand what has happened and navigate the new normal, even as it is unfolding. This raises so many questions that I don’t have answers to yet, but I do have some early thoughts.
The first and most obvious is that this “new normal” is emerging, fast changing and will continually evolve. We must be able to be fluid and creative in how we shift and change along with it. We must also be ready to throw out some old ways of doing things to make way for the new.
The second, equally obvious, is that this “new normal” will impact people in very different ways, and we cannot presume to know what life is like for everyone. We must listen respectfully and carefully. Our audiences are creative, inventive and insightful — we must hold space for them, be participatory and and co-create these stories with them.
The third is a counterpoint to co-creation; we have moved very swiftly from contempt for experts to relying on them daily. Our expert scholars, thinkers, historians and artists have an important role to play in dialogue with our audiences — sharing knowledge and providing insights that help to inform the real conversations we all want to have together.
Right now I can feel the swell of compassion coming from the culture I’m consuming, whether it’s produced by individuals in social media or enormous broadcasting behemoths. There is a renewed appreciation of humanity, the fragility of the society we live within and just how vulnerable we humans are. But looking back over the past six months I can also see how quickly public sentiment moves. I wonder how we will tell the stories of this time in a way that reminds us of the courage, compassion and generosity we are capable of, and how we are all connected across the globe by our human-ness, by what we have in common.
