No donations, no entrance fees, no government funding: How culture is threatened in New York and other US cities.
Street musicians can still perform in New York, like Jeffrey Parker here in front of Lincoln Center Foto: Gabriella Borter/reuters
The news comes on March 19: The New York Metropolitan Opera, one of the best opera houses in the world, is putting its orchestra, choir and numerous other employees on the street. They will continue to be paid for a few days, then they have to apply for unemployment benefit. It is just one of the many bad news in the corona crisis that is shaking New York, the world capital of culture.
The city’s cultural institutions are not prepared for such a crisis. All houses have been closed for weeks, all stages orphaned. The most important sources of income have collapsed: entrance fees and private donations. The former are completely eliminated due to the closings. And fundraising has become almost impossible. In the spring, many New York institutions traditionally raise large sums of money with charity galas and special programs for donors. Everything failed.
The Metropolitan Museum alone expects a corona-related loss of $ 150 million. The first employees were given unpaid leave or dismissed. It looks no different in the Guggenheim Museum, the MoMa, the Whitney Museum.
A survey by “Americans for the Arts”, a lobby group for American artists, shows: 62 percent of the approximately 11,000 participating artists have become unemployed because of the corona crisis. 80 percent have no plan how to recover from the crisis.
Part-time job, quit
Freelance artists “the crisis is hit on several fronts,” says Stacy Tenenbaum Stark, managing director of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Otherwise, spring is packed with vernissages, art fairs and premieres. Past. Most of them cannot make a living from their artistic work anyway. In order to stay afloat, however, they usually work in easily terminable jobs as waiters or Uber drivers. Jobs that now often no longer exist. Many artists have the feeling that “their artistic careers have been interrupted or ended entirely,” says Tenenbaum Stark.
She wants to help. Since the outbreak of the crisis in the USA, Tenenbaum’s Foundation has joined forces with six other art funding initiatives and founded “Artists Relief”. Together they raised $ 11.6 million. They will distribute $ 5,000 a week through September to 100 artists in need. 55,000 artists have applied for the first two rounds.
“Americans for the Arts” estimates that the US cultural institutions alone would need at least four billion dollars to just survive the crisis. A sum that would have to come from state pots. In the end, however, the US Congress made available just $ 75 million for the “National Endowment for the Arts”, the US federal agency for arts and culture, in order to use the money to provide institutions and artists suffering from the corona crisis help. In the magazine Vulture the theater critic Helen Shaw is outraged that the money could perhaps be used to shoot a season of the series “Westworld”. But not revitalizing an entire sector.
Unemployment benefit, in theory
After all, freelance artists can now also apply for unemployment benefits. Theoretically. In many states and also in New York, the authorities are completely overwhelmed by the flood of applications. Within a few weeks, 33.4 million people across the country have registered as unemployed. It can take weeks for funds to appear.
On Broadway, where all the lights have been out since March 12th, some dream of an opening soon. The “Broadway League”, which represents producers and theater owners, already announced a date for this at the beginning of April: June 7th. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York State, has already dismissed it. “What Broadway thinks I would definitely not call direction,” he said. On May 4th, he unveiled his plan to reopen New York. Theaters and cinemas only appear in the fourth and final phase. That can take a long time.
The director Rachel Chavkin has only one word on the phone for the basic mood that prevails in the New York theater scene: “Fear”. In 2019 she received Tony’s directorship for the musical “Hadestown” and is now working with other artists and scientists to enable an opening while taking infection protection into account. There is no solution yet.
At the moment, “for most of them, it’s not about when, but how,” says Chavkin. The health of the artists, stagehands and spectators come first. And she believes that for a “long, long time” the virus will set the pace. Is Broadway Doomed? Chavkin doesn’t see that. Broadway is tough, that’s what she learned after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
At least the crisis has unleashed enormous creativity when it comes to bringing art to the internet. The New York museums and theaters outdid each other with streaming offers, there are live studio tours on Instagram and public Zoom meetings in which artists present new ideas in Powerpoint presentations. Still, everyone knows that this is no real substitute.
Record-Release-Party im Internet
The composer and drummer of the acclaimed experimental percussion combo Tigue, Matt Evans, just had to move the record release party for his new solo album “New Topographics” online. This is not a permanent solution. “No matter what we do on the Internet, there is always a lack of that special moment that occurs when people come together in a room.”
The songwriter and producer Eliot Krimsky dares a cautiously optimistic look into the future. He and many of his artist friends would just pause and “reconsider their artistic work from scratch”. He was able to publish his most recent solo album “Lyfe” in non-Corona times. Perhaps one day he will say about his next album that it would not have come about in this form without Corona. Little consolation. But at least it is.
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