Americans for the Arts

Times have changed. The alarm has been struck, and it is declared that for the next few months we are living in a state of emergency. The alarm will persist in the background for months as we try to make sense of our world. For many, our lives have become paralyzed as we wait for announcements and instruction on how we are to continue working. Others continue their commutes to their jobs, as the essential laborers and custodians of our world. For now, many of us are remotely reporting via digital platforms, supervising the structures of a disordered world through virtual windows. As a curator of public programs, I am tasked with the delicate observation of people—understanding their needs, anticipating their questions, and often regulating their movement.

Regularly, a function of my work is to administer programs that reach the public through forums, meetings, performances, and close interactions. As part of the development of public programs, I often have to think about parsing out how the public will interact with artistic practices. What experience should they expect? How do we facilitate participation? What are the avenues for explanation? When do we provide hospitality and comfort? As a curator of public programs, it is in the nature (and definition) of this work that I care for all individuals through their experience in artistic environments.

In the midst of this emergency, I have observed how institutions have immediately taken action to facilitate programs. Within days of emergency announcements, institutions transformed public programs to online experiences. Administrators swiftly re-assembled months of plans and budgets into digital actionable items. I admire the resilience of the arts sector—its agility and improvisation are often pulled off with success, disproportional to anemic budgets with robust audiences. Yet, I am also dismayed that the arts, once again, confronts a different crisis, an unprecedented crisis.

In Elaine Scarry’s “Thinking in an Emergency,” she writes about how emergencies seduce us to stop thinking. Often, the sound of the alarm urges us to give up thinking and to act with a speed to quickly end the emergency; however, we should also consider how “rather than emergency bringing about the end of thinking, thinking should bring about the end of emergency.” As administrators, it is natural that we should want to react. Instinctual to our work is our call to action, deliverables, and “next step” agenda items. Yet, as we have heard over again, times have changed.

As our public landscape continues to mutate, our cultural mindsets are evolving. As we plan for the next fiscal year, the upcoming season of programs, and our traveling exhibitions, it is natural that we be asked to predict upon a warped future. As we prepare, we are being asked to plan for theater seat capacities despite social distancing; visa procedures for traveling speakers despite unstable policy restrictions; public attendance despite public crises. With so many unknowns, this is the time to carefully think and to refocus our values, realign our missions, and home in on super visions. If we have learned anything from our current crisis, it is that actions will not always end the emergency. Yes, they will aid as we enter “unprecedented times,” but we should also resist our urge to act only. This is the time to also think.

In his essay “In What Time Do We Live?” Jacques Ranciére writes about the phrase times have changed. He says, “‘Times have changed’ does not simply mean that something has disappeared. It means that they have become impossible: they don’t belong any longer to what the new times makes possible.” At first, his sentence reads with a sense of pessimistic impotence; however, he also charges us with a refreshing thought: the permission to shed the past. Indeed, this natural crisis has revealed how our current ways of working are impossible to sustain. It is increasingly clear that our cultural ecosystems are too fragile to weather with the usual resilience. Culture will not disappear; it will continue to act on its own. As cultural workers, this is our time to give ourselves permission to think and to develop a vision beyond what lies in the past—a super-vision.