Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T21:57:41.806Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Impact of the 2020 crises on the arts and culture in the United States: The effect of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement in historical context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2021

Stanley N. Katz  and
Leah Reisman
Stanley N. Katz*
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States
Leah Reisman
Affiliation:
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts and cultural sector in the United States, placing the 2020 crises in the context of the United States’s historically decentralized approach to supporting the arts and culture. After providing an overview of the United States’s private, locally focused history of arts funding, we use this historical lens to analyze the combined effects of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement on a single metropolitan area – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace a timeline of key events in the national and local pandemic response and the reaction of the arts community to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that the nature of these intersecting responses, and their fallout for the arts and cultural sector, stem directly from weaknesses in the United States’s historical approach to administering the arts. We suggest that, in the context of widespread organizational vulnerability caused by the pandemic, the United States’s decentralized approach to funding culture also undermines cultural organizations’ abilities to respond to issues of public relevance and demonstrate their civic value, threatening these organizations’ legitimacy.

Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 449 - 465
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Balogh, Brian. 2015. The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brinkley, Alan. 1995. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Brown, Alan. 2006. “An Architecture of Value.” Grantmakers in the Arts Reader. https://www.giarts.org/sites/default/files/brown_an-architecture-of-value.pdf (accessed 22 December 2020).Google Scholar
Cebul, Brent, Geismer, Lily, and Williams, Mason. 2019. Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cowie, Jefferson. 2016. The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Toqueville, Alexis. (1835) 1948. Democracy in America. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
De Toqueville, Alexis. 1960. “DeTocqueville on Democracy and the Arts.” Daedalus 89, no. 2: 401–4.Google Scholar
DiMaggio, Paul. 1982. “Cultural Entrepreneurship in 19th-Century Boston.” In Rethinking Popular Culture, edited by Mukerji, Chandra and Schudson, Michael, 374–97. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Florida, Richard, and Seman, Michael. 2020. “Lost Art: Measuring COVID-19’s Devastating Impact on America’s Creative Economy.” Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, August. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/20200810_Brookingsmetro_Covid19-and-creative-economy_Final.pdf (accessed 22 December 2020).Google Scholar
Gerstle, Gary. 2015. Liberty and Coercion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gerstle, Gary, Lichtenstein, Nelson, and O’Connor, Alice, eds. 2019. Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. 2014. 2014 Portfolio. Philadelphia: Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira. 2013. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York: Liveright.Google Scholar
Kettl, Donald. 2020. The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn’t Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Google Scholar
Kisida, Brian, and Bowen, Daniel. 2019. “New Evidence of the Benefits of Arts Education.” Brown Center ChalkBoard, Brookings Institution, 12 February. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/02/12/new-evidence-of-the-benefits-of-arts-education/ (accessed 22 December 2020).Google Scholar
O’Connor, Alice. 2009. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2020. Culture Shock: COVID-19 and the Cultural and Creative Sectors. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.Google Scholar
Ransby, Barbara. 2018. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. Oakland: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reisman, Leah. 2017. “Arts Funding Ecologies and Organizational Survival: The Case of Philadelphia.” Working Paper. Princeton Center for the Study of Social Organization, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel. 2011. Age of Fracture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenstein, Carole, Riley, Vanesa, Rocha, Natalia, and Tyler, Boenecke. 2013. “The Distribution and Policy Implications of US State Government General Operating Support to the Arts and Culture: Lessons from the Great Recession. Cultural Trends 22, nos. 3–4: 180–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schonfeld, Roger C., Westermann, Mariët, and Sweeney, Liam. 2015. “Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey,” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 28 January. https://sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/SR-Mellon-Report-Art-Museum-Staff-Demographic-Survey-01282019.pdf (accessed 22 December 2020).Google Scholar
Steensland, Brian. 2018. The Failed Welfare Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Stern, Mark J. and Seifert, Susan C.. 2013. “The Changing Contours of Philadelphia’s Cultural Ecology, 1997–2012.” CultureBlocks Working Paper no. 3. Social Impact of the Arts Project, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Tani, Karen. 2016. States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zunz, Oliver. 2014. Philanthropy in America: A History. Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar