Pandemics creep up on us slowly, and without our suspecting, while we are distracted. Likewise, human experience shows that they recede gradually and without our noticing. For those in the eye of its storm—those that experience their devastating impact firsthand without the hope of an end in sight—they touch and shape their daily lives and their societies, in big and small ways. History shows, that across millennia, pandemics throw a harsh light on existing cleavages in societies and shortcomings in their organization; fuel deliberation, agitation, and the search for new ideas; and accelerate or bring about change. There is no reason to believe the effect of the pandemic that is presently affecting every continent will not follow a similar path.

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.

Economists, political scientists, and journalists around the world have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic will have long-term effects on twenty-first-century global society. As a precipitating factor in the final collapse of the post-1945 world order, the pandemic has been seen as an epochal turning point in human history. This article will examine the long-term effects that the pandemic may have on the protection and promotion of cultural heritage, which has become a major economic and political undertaking in the post-World War II era, with earlier roots in elite aesthetics and the rise of mass tourism in the nineteenth century. This article will identify some dramatic changes in economic activity and politics that may transform the social role of cultural heritage in the coming decades.

Africa as a continent has been hit by the coronavirus – the COVID-19 pandemic – as have many parts of the world. Many African Union (AU) member states were badly hit by the virus, while others were only mildly impacted. The arts, culture, and heritage sectors have been severely hit by the pandemic. Fortunately, in many countries in Africa, arts, culture, and heritage were placed at the heart of strategic priorities at the national, regional, and continental levels of combating COVID-19.

The revitalization of fermentation projects during COVID-19 raises questions about the preservation of the pandemic’s material and ephemeral effects – a topic that heritage policy is well equipped to engage. These activities also emphasize the necessity of engaging with heritage practices as a kind of care, encompassing both methods of safekeeping and practices of empathy. In addition, heritage ferments prove “good to think” around themes of loss and preservation, the interpretation of novel viruses through traditional food practices, and the coupling of heritage to microbes. Connecting microbes with heritage allows us to consider points of overlap: as bearers of patrimony with cultural and material lineages, as central to heritage tastes, and as open to geographical indications or other protections to further a kind of microbial resource management. Despite the pandemic’s devastating impact, consideration of heritage ferments points to both emancipatory and constraining outcomes for our post-pandemic future.

Il CoViD-19 contamina i corpi, ma anche le anime. Gli individui, ma anche le comunità. Ciò che le tiene in vita come il sangue e l’aria: la memoria culturale, la creatività, i paesaggi, il patrimonio artistico, le arti figurative, la danza, la musica, il teatro, l’opera, il pensiero filosofico e matematico, la ricerca scientifica, la letteratura, la storia. Sono le nostre coordinate, la terra su cui poggiamo i piedi: ma rischiamo di non pensarci abbastanza, tanto lo diamo per scontato. E in tempi come questi, scontato non è.

This article introduces the concept of the dark side of cultural heritage protection. It points out how the many and mostly honorable efforts to protect cultural heritage against the harms of war and conflict sometimes contribute to make cultural heritage vulnerable or even to cause its destruction. The more we talk about cultural heritage and its value and the importance of protecting it, the more interesting it becomes for some groups to target it. This article argues that states, international organizations, and the heritage community need to recognize these negative side effects and make sure to consider them in future action.

This article deals with the question of whether regional cultural competence centers foster the diversity of cultural expressions and how the objectives of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Convention on Cultural Diversity are implemented. By introducing the Convention on Cultural Diversity, the conditions of regional cultural policy governance, and the idea of regional cultural competence centers, a framework for evaluation is outlined. The evaluation of four regional cultural competence centers in the Swiss Central Region shows that fostering cultural diversity is complex and has many different approaches and effects. The final discussion concludes that principles such as “interculturality,” “freedom,” and “access for all” under the Convention on Cultural Diversity can promote a diversity of cultural expressions but that these criteria have to be set from outside—for example, by public funding institutions—so that regional actors implement them.