Guardian: Funding Artists Could Save Us from Covid-19
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to The Guardian, the lack of support for the creative community is harming the development of our most effective weapon against unexpected situations like Covid-19 – the arts.
We need to stop punishing artists: their creative thinking will help us out of this crisis
Esther Anatolitis
Tue 28 Jul 2020 14.02 AESTWhat’s needed now is an ambitious national vision that invests in arts and culture comprehensively
As everyone keeps telling us: we’re in unprecedented times. And unprecedented times call for unprecedented thinking.
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What’s the No 1 skillset needed for the workforce and economy of the future? A wealth of global research, from the World Economic Forum to PWC, Deloitte, McKinsey, Nesta, Harvard, and even the Australian government’s Bureau of Communications and Arts Research agree: it’s creativity.
Why have we been so unprepared to deal with Covid-19’s challenges? Because “we really lack creative imagination”, Osterholm told Sales. Despite repeated warnings, he continued, we’re told by politicians that “no one could have envisioned – or so they say – all the constellation of things that have happened here: not just a virus crossing from an animal to a human, but the worldwide transmission, the impact that it has on healthcare, the fact that it also shuts down our global economy”.
If “no one could have envisioned” the inevitable set of possibilities that experts have been outlining in detail, then contemporary governance is in big trouble. Because the capacity to envision a complex set of possibilities is fundamental to good governance.
It’s also, of course, the fundamental skillset of the artist.
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I value art, some of my friends and business associates are artists, and I love what learning a bit of art has done for my life. I thoroughly recommend everyone do an art course, just for the experience. But this demand for extra government assistance to rescue what are allegedly society’s foremost problem solvers is just absurd.
Right now artists have a captive audience of millions of really bored people stuck in lockdown, staying at home with nothing but an internet connection, a regular payment from the government and endless free time. Surely there is some kind of opportunity right now for truly creative artists to reach out to their audience and make some money.
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via Watts Up With That?
July 28, 2020 at 04:46PM
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