(Bloomberg Opinion) -- And then there’s the arts. A whole world of live performances, museums, and exhibits have been closed by the coronavirus -- a shared and vital culture that can be fully experienced only by physical presence. When the Covid-19 emergency passes and the world reopens around us, will people return to these rich and wondrous spaces?
Even a small change in habits could have a major impact on cultural institutions. The nation’s museums, by way of example, take pride in the fact that their combined annual visitors, at 850 million, significantly dwarf the 483 million who attend professional sporting events and theme parks. Attendance at symphony orchestra performances in the U.S. tops 20 million annually.
And physical presence changes the way we experience all the fine arts. Consider: The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., displays side by side two of Claude Monet’s series of paintings of the West Façade of the Rouen Cathedral. The pair were painted at slightly different angles and at different times of day. When I’m in the city and have an extra hour, it’s been my habit to stop by the gallery, sit on the bench, and lose myself in the effort to work out the minute distinctions. I’ve been doing it for years, and I’m a long way from exhausting the experience.
It’s an act of both reverence and contemplation, to say nothing of admiration. And there’s no other way to do it but by sitting there. Looking at images of the paintings online is no more a substitute for physical presence than reading about riding a bicycle is a substitute for getting some exercise.
You can’t remotely wander the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art, and it’s hard to appreciate the Mona Lisa without jostling through the crowd to see it face to face. I often listen to opera while I write, but it’s not the same as experiencing a performance. (Watching opera on video, unless there’s no alternative, is a vulgarity.) Without physical presence, the fine arts are not so fine.
But right now, like everything else, the arts are hurting.
The National Gallery is backstopped by the federal government. So are other museums along the Mall. In big cities, many a museum and event space is richly endowed. But when you get beyond the universe of what is unfairly derided as “elite” culture, thousands of smaller spaces are in trouble. Many were already teetering; the present emergency makes their situation worse.
A coalition of foundations in New York City is pledging $75 million in grants to small local museums and event spaces that are struggling during the shutdown. (Disclosure: one of those foundations is Bloomberg Philathropies, founded by Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.) They hope philanthropists in other parts of the country will follow their lead. Many already have. But the money is only a stopgap, because we don’t know how people will behave when the emergency ends.
Take dance. According to a 2018 survey by Dance/USA, holiday performances of “The Nutcracker” account for an astonishing 55% of the annual revenue of the median dance company. For many companies, it’s the only performance that turns a profit. If come December, enough parents say, “It’s just too big a risk for my kids this year,” the entire industry will be upended.
To avoid this possibility, there will surely be changes. Some may be subtle — an abundance of hand sanitizer all through performance spaces, for instance, or ushers wearing nitrile gloves turning away people who seem sick. Not long before the coronavirus worry became a panic, my son and I attended the Metropolitan Opera’s excellent presentation of Mozart’s “Le nozze di Figaro.” A member of the audience seated one row behind us spent the entire afternoon coughing. Henceforth, one suspects that coughing in an enclosed public space will become what the essayist A. J. Liebling called a “specimen” crime — a thing that’s perfectly legal but which everybody knows you just don’t do, and for which it’s entirely appropriate for strangers to chastise the offender.
One hopes that these changes will be enough for the arts and all they represent to thrive again. The fine arts do their best to capture all that is best and most lasting from the human creative imagination. In one’s ideal world, once the emergency ends, all will be as it was: the Smithsonian museums will once more be thick with bused-in youngsters undergoing that familiar rite of passage for middle-schoolers; audiences will once again be moved to tears by Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G major; book talks at the libraries will bring in vast audiences.
But one can easily imagine a different future, one in which even after the emergency ends people remain reluctant to experience culture that demands physical presence. To meet their concerns, the museums and opera houses might adapt to a world that wants more social distancing. Museums might commit to allowing only a limited number of visitors at a time. Live performance spaces might promise to leave half or more of the seats empty.
The consequences are easy to predict: At the margin, long lines at museums will lead some potential visitors to make other choices about how to spend their time. They might never come back. And if the opera and the ballet and the symphony orchestra decide not to fill their theaters to capacity, they risk not bringing in enough revenue to survive. To cut costs, they might wind up paying musicians and other performers less, a course that would surely promote a negative synergy that would lead to their swift collapse.
Again, one hopes we can avoid that path. But I wonder.
Some months back, my wife and I bought tickets for a jazz concert scheduled for early May of this year. The event featured a popular artist and swiftly sold out. Just recently we learned that the performance has been rescheduled for November. Assuming the emergency’s over by then, will we go? If we do, will we be surrounded by empty seats?
That’s the question facing the culture that demands physical presence. No amount of money will rescue these wonderful resources if everybody is too scared to go back.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. His novels include “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” and his latest nonfiction book is “Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster.”
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.