3 Years In, Arts World Remains Upturned

(Arts Analysis) We’re back, but we’re not.

That’s the message I got over and over again in 2022, from artists, organizations, and audiences — as an arts reporter, a working musician, and someone who’s part of the informal network of people giving touring musicians a place to stay while they’re on the road. 

In the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, the arts in 2020 and 2021 were about tending the flame, about reinvention and adaptability. Lurking in the background was a vague idea that perhaps in 2022 things would be ​“back to normal,” even as artists questioned whether that was possible, or for that matter wanted; perhaps we could pick up the pieces and use them to make something better.

Instead, as 2022 began and an intense wave of Covid cases subsided, a certain exhaustion set in. We were tired of the pandemic. In word, national, state, and local governments and businesses effectively announced that it was over. No more mask mandates, everyone back to work, back to school. But in deed, that exhaustion manifested itself in a different way. The arts were the bellwether of that exhaustion, just as they were the canary in the coal mine in March 2020, as artists watched their work evaporate a week before everything shut down.

In the New Haven area, music clubs reopened, but none of them booked as many shows in 2022 as they had in 2019 — not Cafe Nine, or the State House, or College Street Music Hall or Space Ballroom. Art galleries reopened, but the Ely Center of Contemporary Art nearly lost the John Slade Ely House, for decades a home for the visual arts in the Elm City. Turnout for the Artspace-organized Open Source events in the fall was, by and large, a shadow of the roving parties of the past.

Theater — perhaps the art form that suffered the most during the pandemic — took the hardest hit. The Shubert reopened, but contended with fewer shows and strict policies for gathering people together. Collective Consciousness, with its smaller, enclosed space, waited it out. Yale Repertory Theater saw perceptibly smaller audiences. And Long Wharf Theatre lost the space on Sargent Drive that it had occupied since 1965, a severe blow despite the management’s dogged determination to turn it into something positive.

All of these factors had their individual stories explaining how they came to pass. But over my year of conversations with working artists, space owners, and booking agents — and of experiences as a performer — certain themes emerged. 

Everyone described a sense of uncertainty, that the rules had changed, and not for the better. In music, touring musicians were being eaten alive by the costs of gas, food, and lodging, which rose dramatically in between the time they signed contracts for gigs and performing those gigs. And they kept getting sick, kept having to cancel. Club owners talked about how they could no longer predict which shows would be successes. Across the arts, everyone perceived hesitation on the part of audiences to return. Maybe people were afraid of getting sick. Maybe their lifestyles had changed and they just didn’t go out anymore. Maybe they didn’t have the disposable income, or the time. Maybe they were just tired.

We’re back, but we’re not.

It’s not all bad news, of course. A new generation of artists and musicians has hit the scene. Some of them are people who, during the shutdown, had a chance to hone their craft, and are now ready to present it to the public. Others are bands who were too young in 2019 to play in clubs, but apparently spent the pandemic practicing. Smaller, more unconventional spaces have thrived, whether it’s Never Ending Books under the aegis of the Volume Two collective, Gather on State Street, Bloom in Westville, or Best Video in Hamden.

The Covid-19 pandemic never meant the death of art itself, and it still doesn’t. The arts, the practice of them, are fine. Creative people always find ways to do what they do; historically, artists have made art under much more difficult circumstances than these. But the fragile state of the arts as a scene, a sector — their institutions, gathering spaces, and events — as a part of New Haven’s economic and cultural ecosystem, gives the lie to the message governments and big businesses are putting out, and that, for understandable reasons, many want to believe, that things are back to normal. They are, but they’re not. And maybe they never can be.

There are possible ways forward from that understanding. For artists there is experimenting with reaching audiences where they are, whether it’s at traditional gatherings in clubs, galleries, and theaters, or in online spaces, outdoor places, smaller storefronts, living rooms, or street corners. Audiences, for their part, can investigate ways to support the arts and specific artists they like, whether it’s showing up for shows, buying art and music, or just giving money directly to artists and arts organizations they value. Arts organizations — and, for that matter, governments and businesses — can figure out ways to make those interactions easier, whether it’s by the usual way of putting on shows in their own spaces, or supporting events in other places, or coming up with new ways for people to connect.

Artists, audiences, and organizations can, will, and to some extent already are doing all of this, and the details of how it all works won’t come together in an op-ed like this one, but in the doing of it. But a certain shift in thinking might help. Before the pandemic, there was a pervasive sense of art as firmly and often quite willingly in the maw of commerce. Art was a hustle. It was a game — until the pandemic came along and flipped the game board over. The years of 2020 and 2021 changed art into escape, therapy, sanctuary. They taught many of us that art is what we turn to when commerce fails. Music, poetry, novels, TV shows, movies, visual art; these things got us through our days. Holding onto that realization, of art’s importance to us, opens the door to finding a way of making art and being a part of the arts scene that better balances our material needs against our mental and emotional ones. We’re tired, in ways we haven’t been before. We can make new and better places to rest.