There it is. I finally spot it, among all the paintings hanging on the walls, weirdly lightened by the cold beam of light.

 

Van Gogh is my favourite painter. But as I never got the chance to stroll around the buzzing streets of Amsterdam, no visit to the Van Gogh Museum was paid, yet.

 

But here I am now, in front of the Almond Blossoms. The green-blurring-into-grey branches studded with cream and ivory flowers. The powder blue in the background.

 

I look at the four corners of the painting, that’s my ritual. The alternation of heavy dark lines marking the bark and soft and soothing spots of whitish colour. The thick brushes of paint...

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Then the laptop reconnects to the WIFI, the unmistakable acute sound of emails downloading stops any Stendhal experience to happen and rectangular notification boxes hectically invade the upper right part of the screen.

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“Damn virtual tours. This wouldn’t happen in real life.”

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I'm sure I'm not the first nor the last one who got their virtual visit to the museum they long wanted to hit, ruined by the medium that enabled it in the first place. Whether this experience can measure up with the physical one is up to every individual’s sensitivity.

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What’s most surprising, however, is the huge spectrum of possibility you can find out there right now. Out there on the internet, of course, as these days most of the world is locked in. You can visit the Van Gogh Museum and then the Guggenheim, the Uffizi Gallery or the Musée d’Orsay. And then there are concerts, ranging from the classics performed by the Berlin Philharmonic to Instagram Live streamings from Chris Martin’s living room. All of this for free.

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But why is this happening? Why have the online free contents provided by the creative and cultural industry spiked this way since the beginning of the shutdown in Europe?

 

Because of the lockdown, you might say. Yes, sure. Whoever is lucky enough to have a roof over their head is getting bored. Or anxious. The need to escape this unsettling reality is strong. The urge to fill the long-desired time that we suddenly don’t know how to manage is probably even stronger. People need comfort, nourishment, entertainment.

 

And here come the Arts, with their idea of saving the world, changing minds and reshaping reality. In the endless list of listicles on the ultimate online exhibitions you can’t miss in this new week of quarantine, the most common explanation is that the public has got to be fed.

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Another reason can be out there though. A less audience-centric one, which puts the cultural and creative sector in the spotlight, relieving it from its salvific burden. This piece does not intend to provide the ultimate answer on why the creative sector is offering such loads of free content, but to show another possible explanation, another little brick in the wall of the complexity of the world.

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A wide-spread idea is that art should be free for all. Especially in this moment, where many got laid down and a sense of injustice cast upon our lives, some could feel even more entitled to demand compensation of some sort. However, this is all about the audience. The less reported side of this story is how artists put bread on the table and how this affects how they do what they do.

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As outlined in the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, the EU aims to preserve, support and promote the European culture and its industry both in its external international relations and within its borders. It provides a legal framework for this industry and throughout the years it has established different initiatives for the promotion of the diversity of the cultures, like the European Heritage Days, the European Capitals of Culture and CREATIVE EUROPE, just to mention a few. Culture and creativity are considered to be vital for ensuring the development of society and the production of economic wealth.

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Yet, according to Eurostat, in 2017 the EU 28 spent for the defence sector 1.3% of the total GDP. Fundings for the Creative and Cultural Industry, on the other hand, go under the cap of Recreation, Culture and Religion. In 2017, 1,0% of general government expenditure in the Eu-28 was devoted to the latter. Culture “drives innovation and acts as a catalyst for change”, but defence and military strategy are still funded more. How can this not have an impact on how this industry perceives itself and therefore (re)acts in terms of production?

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In 2002 an empirical study called “Relation of Social Support and Self-Esteem to Problem Behavior: Investigation of Differing Models” came out, signed by Benjamin Moran and David DuBois. The two researchers of the University of Missouri, Columbia, tested the impact of social support and self-worth perception on young individuals. The results show that the level of social support by the group of reference (usually composed of family members, friends and peers) has a key role in the appearance of deviant behaviours in teenagers, both directly and through the mediating effect of self-esteem. Foreseeably, the narrower the support and the self-esteem, the bigger the chance to carry out deviant and self-destructive behaviours.

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In other words, they empirically proved that problem and deviant behaviours - such as theft and acts of violence - are directly linked to the level of support received by the significant others and the perception of one’s worth, which in turn is affected by the level of social support.

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What’s the point of this study, you might be wondering right now? Well, it’s reasonable to assume that this could happen with an industry as a whole as well. As an entity with self-awareness, its interactions and behaviours are shaped by the contexts it lies in and by the attitudes and actions of the entities, it’s in dialogue with, namely the public sector and the audience.

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Following this logic, the low amount of fundings provided by the public sector, both on the national and the European level, should shape the decisions the creative and cultural sector takes. And if it lacks support, it’s going to put into place problematic behaviours. Providing online free contents could indeed be seen as one of them, as in the long run, it could become a threat to the survival of the sector itself.

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Put the creative industry’s shoes on for a second. If you were told that you are meant to enhance humankind and kick off development and then you discover that weapons are more financed than you are, wouldn’t you start questioning your own value? No wonder it started selling out, not asking for any compensation for its work. That’s simply not what its financer - the entity that’s supposed to provide and show support - taught it. If it’s not getting properly funded, how can it think to be worth being paid?

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Although acknowledging the limitation of not having empirical evidence on the topic, Luciana Carraro - researcher in Social Psychology at the University of Padua - agrees that “this dynamic between the creative industry and the public sector can occur. This would actually open an interesting path of research, as on a theoretical level this could definitely work.”

The thought of humanizing an entity which is not human too much per se could raise some scepticism. Then I had a chat with Lorenzo Maragoni - artistic director of the Italian theatre company Amor Vacui.

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“Live arts are very scared right now, that’s why everyone is hurrying to find a spot on the virtual stage, that’s why the internet is so saturated. Partially, the artists are to blame”, he confesses with a slight chuckle, “We are afraid to be forgotten.”

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He still thinks that art has that special gift of bringing people closer, to make them kinder, to create a sense of togetherness. He agrees that this is one of the reasons for this free content explosion. “The mission for art is always the same, in regular periods and in times of crisis.

To fight capitalism”, he laughs, not so jokingly, and then goes on, “Arts promote kindness.

And social change. In the hiatus between how the world is and how we want it to be, that’s where great art makes its magic, making us feel seen and heard and understood, yet not normalized.”

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This insider perspective made me think that for an industry, a non-human entity, this creative sector has a lot of emotions after all. If the industry that’s told by everyone to be the balm for the soul is also so afraid of getting forgotten, struggles with self-esteem as for a lack of support seem to be more and more reasonable.

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Not everyone shares this opinion, however. “I think we need to distinguish two aspects when we talk about the creative industry”, says Ludovico Ferro, Professor of Sociology at the University of Padua, “I would draw a line between the creative part, namely those people who actually come up with ideas and are more interested in the creative process, and the production branch, which is more focused on the economic aspect of the story. I would say the first one finds its confirmation with regards to self-esteem not in the amount of funding it receives, but in the approval of the peers and of the critics. Of course, for them it’s important to fill up theatres, but a positive mention by the experts is far more important.”

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This is confirmed when Lorenzo Maragoni spots the silver lining, among all the challenges posed by the shift to the online, and specifically to theatre rehearsals on Zoom. New medium means new opportunities.

 

“You become extremely conscious about what you decide to include or leave out in the frame of the webcam. That little box can tell a lot of different stories and this is very thrilling from an artistic point of view.”

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He moves the laptop and frames the white wardrobe in the background, then his hand enters the screen and starts moving like it was about to grab an invisible fly. “If I do this for instance, and someone else in the other screens does the same, we create a pattern, something to communicate that breaks the borders of the lack of compresence.”

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He grabs the laptop and raises it, turning it to the window opened to a sunny day of April.

“You see, I can bring you [the audience ndr] around with me, I can show you what’s outside my window, the sky. We don’t have a sky in the theatre.”

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“The second soul”, continues Ludovico Ferro, “the one driven by economic motives and which is mainly interested in selling a product, would then indeed be more concerned about the payback of their creation and could possibly get its self-worth perception affected by the level of fundings they get.”

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Different faces of the same industry find confirmations, approval and self-esteem boosting factors in different things, he assesses. This is probably a necessary distinction, but what are artists gonna eat once their walls are wallpapered in good reviews and their ego is full?

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Even before the shutdowns, but especially in the current situation, the migration to the virtual stage is something you can’t opt-out of, if you don’t want to be left behind. Even thinking of a theatre company, a music band or a freelance cartoonist willingly deciding not to open a professional account online seems anachronistic.

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“Does it even happen if you don’t post it?”

And online the line between artistic soul and digital entrepreneur blurs, if one even exists. So how can one distinguish between faces and tensions, if every organism is not merely the sum of the single parts combining it, but a whole new thing itself?

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In the capitalistic system we are all embedded in, everything needs to have a value, a monetizable one, and whatever the creative sector generates is both a piece of art and a product. It doesn’t matter that what the creative and cultural industry has to offer might be driven by the most sincere commitment to enhance human development, this is recognised, seen, judged by the rules of this game too. This ought to have an impact on how it plays.

That’s why the fact that, at least in the West, public funding must impact on the psyche of this sector too. No wonder the dissonance between “art will save the world” and the low support led to the actions of such a generous yet on the long run self-destructive behaviour.

Free contents to save the audience, currently in lockdown. And to slowly threaten the industry’s own existence.

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What is gonna happen to the creative sector after this pandemic is over we shall not know, yet. People might realise that they want to support and keep enjoying the contents that raised their spirits when trapped at home, after what Luciana Carraro calls “free sample effect”. Or they could refuse to start paying for something they previously enjoyed for free. People might go back to fill up theatres and cinemas, concert halls. Or they could think that watching a concert from their couch is not that bad after all.

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As for me, I’m definitely going to Amsterdam to see the Almond Blossoms, without any forms of technological mediation or email pop-ups.

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