How has our cultural world survived COVID-19 ?
As museums and cultural places reopened in France at the beginning of June, it is time to take a step back and look at what we can learn
The impact of Covid on cultural heritage
The situation has been catastrophic for museums and cultural places. They have been closed or open on narrow gauge for months since March 2020. The NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) lost more than 100 million dollars and has been obliged to cut its payroll by 20%: The MET faces the same situation as any other cultural place.
Some museums, such as the Musée Rodin in France, have even been obliged to sell pieces of arts to survive.
In the USA, the American Alliance of Museum (AAM) estimates the bankruptcy of 30% of American museums. Such a situation will be catastrophic for communities, the economy, education, and cultural history.
Facing this situation, governments have been obliged to financially support culture in their country. The British government has released 82 million euros to help its 35 most important cultural monuments (Shakespeare’s Globe, Old Vic theater, and the London Transport Museum, for example).
In France, with the knowledge that culture is part of our heritage and crucial for our future, culture will be part of the post-Covid recovery plan. It will take place by financing more tax credits for maintaining private monuments. It will also be a reinforcement of cooperation between tourism and culture departments.
It is impossible to measure the actual financial impact of the Covid-19 crisis on our cultural heritage. Still, it is for sure a terrible situation. Governments are today taking this situation seriously. Let us hope that with the reopening of cultural places and financial aids, cultural sites will shine again to transmit all the knowledge they enclose.
The positive effect of Covid on the cultural world.
Facing the situation, art passionate and culture guardians have innovated and improved their offers to survive and give us access to culture even in quarantine. It is a significant advancement for this sector, often seen as late on digital maturity.
Here are few examples of new services they offered:
Virtual visits and 3D
Many museums developed on their website or their virtual application visits on 3D for users to explore the sites and discover a piece of art from their home. If it already existed before, Covid-19 has permitted to develop this solution at scale on hundreds of museums.
But this exercise was not limited to visits. Like the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, some museums also proposed live workshops to discover more about their museum.
Click to discover the MOMA online.
Museum outside the walls
To give access to culture to everyone, some museums decided to expose outside their walls, either in schools, townhall, Malls, or in the street directly. It was an excellent opportunity for everyone to keep cultural movements on track. For par individuals, it maintained a link to culture even in such a difficult time. It allowed professionals to keep working and do what they prefer in their work: Share their knowledge with everyone.
Online events
Finally, live representation has taken place online. In Paris, theaters allowed people to book a show performed live from the theater and retransmitted to people’s houses. Thanks to this, they have first survived the situation but also created intimists’ experience. Indeed, it was possible to book private sessions and discuss things with the artists after the representation, almost impossible in a normal situation.
As we can see, our cultural world did not let itself drown and fought to survive and to cross borders in digital worlds that were sometimes was unknown to those actors. They demonstrated courage, collective work, and agility to achieve this in such a court term period.
We can all be grateful to have those people as guardians of our cultural world. We now have to go back to museums, theaters, and other cultural places to support them almost back to the everyday world.
And you, have you been able to enjoy art and culture during this period?
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
