Halfway there: A halting, hopeful return for the arts
The arts and entertainment world
was a long way from normal in 2021. The year will go down instead as a time when artists and their audiences moved cautiously toward full re-engagement. We were not ready to break away from the quality content available in our homes—and Hollywood studios acknowledged that by regularly sending big-budget movies immediately to streaming services. But as the months passed and vaccination rates rose, gathering in a public place to see art or hear music or watch actors perform became possible again. Below, six examples of how the terms by which we consume entertainment were actively renegotiated.
The van Gogh boom
What a year for Vincent van Gogh, said Kriston Capps in Bloomberg.com. In “one of the true entertainment industry success stories of the pandemic era,” the 130-yearsdead Dutch painter generated hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales for an array of competing copycat shows that immerse viewers in giant projections of the artist’s brilliantly colored paintings. Given a boost when the fashionable young protagonist of Netflix’s Emily in Paris visited one such exhibition, the immersive van Gogh experiences spread quickly in the spring, eventually opening in nearly 40 U.S. locations, usually in vacant retail or industrial spaces. The trend mirrors a growth in immersive original art installations such as those presented by the Santa Fe–based Meow Wolf collective or the new Superblue museum in Miami, and it has been a boon to commercial landlords hit by the pandemic’s high vacancy rates. One popular living artist, Banksy, has complained that his works, many of which were once displayed on the streets for free, are appearing in an unauthorized show that charges visitors more than $30. Critics have complained that the light shows are gimmicky. But the American public, at least during the early months of its release from lockdown, showed a hunger for more. “All these immersive art-themed light shows converge to form a portrait of a nation eager to get out of the house, while not venturing too far from the safe embrace of streaming television.”
A heartening return
“My top-10 lists usually include just a few Broadway productions. This year’s features six,” said theater critic Jesse
Green in two-man show original plays such as Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s Pass Over, which evokes Waiting for Godot as it examines American racism, and Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s, “an empowerment allegory” that arrives in the guise of a workplace comedy. Those shows and others unleashed “urgent ideas that had been pent up, in some cases not just for months but for years,” and the result was a fall season “as exciting as a child’s first fireworks.” There’s reason to worry that these relatively daring productions will be one-offs that are “done in by economics.” But before midDecember Covid outbreaks among casts and crews forced performance cancellations for nearly a dozen shows, Broadway’s audience had gradually returned, lifting overall weekly attendance to nearly what it had been at the same time in 2019. All those masked and vaccinated ticket buyers must feel the same way I do about theater’s value: “If theater matters differently than television and film, it’s not just because you have to leave your home to be part of it but also because you have to enter someone else’s.”
The thrill of a stadium show
Many of the 50,000 people around me understood that our love of BTS could be derided as childish, said Lenika Cruz in
But for four nights beginning in late November, as the world’s most popular band performed its first concerts in two years—all at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium—the doubters didn’t matter. “Imagine 50,000 people gathered in the dark as lights blink around them like stars. They’re dancing like one body, singing with a single voice in a language that may not be their own.” We weren’t the first fan base to reunite in such numbers: Despite many reports of weak attendance in 2021 for major artists’ concert tours, the music festival business was robust. But BTS’s SoFi concerts emerged as one of the best-selling runs at a single venue for any musical act in history, and they also “served as a kind of vindication of BTS.” Yes, a sevenmember boy band from South Korea,
launched by a tiny label, had grown its fan base organically since 2013 to a level at which it has scored six No. 1 hits in the U.S. since the start of 2020, including some songs in Korean. At the concerts, “I was stunned and heartened by the sheer diversity of the attendees: older women with purple highlights and tattoos, couples wearing matching BTS headbands.” And what a show RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook put on. “When they moved together, you could not look away.”
Spider-Man’s costly triumph
“There are a few weekends that changed the course of the movie business,” said
Tom Brueggemann in IndieWire.com. Jaws did it in the summer of 1975. Just last week, the latest Spider-Man movie did the same. At the tail end of a year in which box office grosses for movies of every category have been depressed, Spider-Man: No Way Home easily beat even the rosiest of projections to score a $260 million opening weekend in the U.S.—the secondhighest of all time, behind 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. That result, which far exceeded the total gross of this year’s previous box office leader, “proves beyond doubt that an audience will race to theaters for certain films”—even in the face of worries such as the Omicron variant. But for people who prefer films that are not based on comicbook superheroes, the bad news was that Spider-Man accounted for an incredible 92 percent of all movie tickets sold in the U.S. for the Dec. 17-19 weekend. By contrast, adult-skewing projects such as Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed remake of West Side Story and Guillermo del Toro’s stylish and star-studded noir Nightmare Alley were buried, together selling only 2.5 percent as many tickets as Spidey did. “All of this reinforces what we knew: There is a seemingly inexhaustible audience for Marvel intellectual property. It also tells us something we didn’t want to know: Big-budget theatrical movies that target adult audiences are a massive and unsustainable risk.”
The allure of connecting
The latest winner of the Game of the Year award compelled players to focus less on winning and “more on the journey itself,” said Aaron Riccio in SlantMagazine.com.
In the journey concerns a couple on the brink of divorce who are forced to cooperate to overcome various fun challenges. The game doesn’t even have a single-player mode.
But it was emblematic of a year during which releases of blockbuster games were rare and greater attention turned to clever games from independent studios. The couple in It Takes Two have been transformed into dolls by a curse, and their adventures send them into fantastical settings that include a zero-gravity pillow fort and a time-warping cuckoo clock. Again and again, It Takes Two “finds new ways to demonstrate how vital communication and effort are in getting two individuals on the same page.” Amid an isolating pandemic, that kind of cooperative play “came to feel like a vital balm.”
A lost bridge-builder
Virgil Abloh, who died of cancer in November at 41, “has rightly been eulogized as the connected man of his era,” said Sam Reiss in The head designer of Louis Vuitton didn’t live to see the year out, but he left his mark on it in the way he brought together art and commerce. Trained as an architect, Abloh called himself “a maker.” He made balletic tennis dresses for Serena Williams, he designed album covers for Kanye West, and he eventually created “just about everything a person could buy, or aspire to own.” For a museum retrospective of his work, which started in Chicago and traveled to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art in July, he had Nike sneakers of his design in the galleries and set up a retail component, cheekily called Church & State, where his young fans could purchase Abloh-branded gear. “In the dim light of grief, the criticisms that were sometimes leveled against his work now seem like misunderstandings.” Yes, he was always selling, attaching his name to Evian bottles, Mercedes-Benz SUVs, Ikea shopping bags. But he was at heart an exemplar of the Instagram-era mindset, which means he thought nothing of taking an interest in how a million different things look. “Abloh kept working because he was excited about what he saw. How could he not be?”