At best, a slow recovery
A look ahead: We want to watch the arts, but will 2021 let us?
This ismy 2021 vision. It is September, maybe October. My wife and I and another couple walk up to a person holding a scanner at the entry to a building on the north or south orwest side of Chicago— or in the suburbs or even in Indiana. My vision is not picky.
I pull four slips of paper from my pocket (which I amholding because, yes, I amthat guy). The person scans not our foreheads, but the bar codes on the paper. Wewalk in, check our coats, grab a cocktail and head to our seats. Our seats are surrounded by other seats. Those other seats are occupied by bodies; bodies that are recognizably, gloriously human; human bodies whose very breath no longer threatens our own with a known debilitating illness.
In front of us all, at the center of our collective focus, there is a stage (or a screen) upon which live entertainment is about to be presented (or projected).
We are a community once again. We are free to celebrate a thing other people have made in order to communicate ideas and emotions, a play, a film, a set of songs in a concert, a suite of paintings on awall. We are allowed again to experience it collectively and then to break down into subgroups afterward to talk about whatwe have justwitnessed.
This is a ritual I have performed thousands of times before. And when it happens again in 2021— even if the band stares at its feet the whole time or the playwright thought shock value could stand in for structure— it will be the most ecstatic feeling I can imagine. Even as I sit here in my overfamiliar home office, space heater whirring atmy feet, my eyes arewelling up as I type this paragraph.
It probablywon’t happen all at once like this, a jump fromsequestration into togetherness. There’ll surely be intermittent steps, reminiscent of this past summer when a few music clubs opened with spread-out indoor seating for the boldest among us.
But forwe cautious sorts, to get to the point wherewe are social again, hold the distancing, very many things will have to break just right.
Fortunately, some of the most important ones have been doing
just that. Some of those performance spaces wherewe used to gather may still be there to receive us thanks to some overdue support fromthe taxeswe pay. The second big federal coronavirus relief bill that passed in late December featured a rather astonishing $15 billion to help keep music venues, theaters and cinemas alive.
“I thinkwe’re all still in a little
bit of shock thatwe pulled it off,” Chris Bauman, owner of Chicago music venues the Patio Theater and AvondaleMusicHall, told me in December. “This saves an entire industry. … This is going to be enough to allowus to be there.”
Bauman is treasurer of the Chicago Independent Venue League, which first brought the historically maverick group of city music clubs together to try to stop
the LiveNation conglomerate from being allowed to establish a range of new venues in the Lincoln Yards mega-development on the city’sNorth Side.
It provided a perfect structure, then, when the pandemic hit and everybodywas forced to cancel all their bookings and turn down the heating for those big empty
halls. CIVL joined up with NIVA, theNational Independent Venue Association, which itself formed quickly in response to the COVID shutdown and in a savvy lobbying effortwon bipartisan support for a “Save Our Stages” bill.
By the time SOS reached passage in the big December relief package, under the less catchy “Grants for Shuttered Venue Operators” moniker, it had grown to includemovie houses, theater stages and zoos and museums, too.
There is some concern that so many hands in the pie will mean not enough fruit to satisfy all. But at least the legislation iswritten to be sure hardest-hit operations get help first, and $2 billion of it is set aside for places with 50 or fewer employees.
“There’s a lot of ifs,” said Robert Gomez, CIVL cochair and owner of Subterranean and Beat Kitchen. “But $15 billion is a lot of money.”
Then there are the civic omens to consider, also trending toward favorable.
“Let’s don’t talk POLtics” is a thing a boisterous drunk guy in the Illinois state capitol of Springfield once said, butting into our
group of mostly Springfield journalists seated outside at a bar. Then he doubleddown on the wrong by telling us that Sammy Hagarwas the best Van Halen singer.
In the current context we can’t not talk politics because it became existential to the arts. We will need to be widely vaccinated in order to sit right next to other people in theaters again, and that stands a much better chance of happening now that the political party that believes in science is about
to be in charge of the federal government.
Except for admirably jump-starting the vaccine development process, the 2017-2020 WhiteHouse treated COVID-19 like someone else’s problem, up to the very end, when it has let states mostly fend for themselves in enacting vaccination plans. The result of this ferality model has been the profoundly disappointing rollout, with that precious prophylactic fluid sitting in freezers instead of being shot into people’s arms.
But the incoming administration has pledged to prioritize not only vaccine procurement but the allimportant logistical grunt work of getting the stuff into our bodies, and they’ve signed on a faculty’sworth of experts to lead the effort.
With the number of vaccines approved and contracts to buy doses of them signed so far, the numbers don’t look promising for the great majority of the population to be inoculated before mid- to late summer, which is how my vision of us reconvening landed on autumn. (Sorry, Lollapalooza, but I just don’t see it— and will be happy to be proven wrong.)
LiveNation President Joe Berchtold, who has a lot riding on optimism, was more optimistic. “It’s our expectation in general that we’ll be able to get back to have full-capacity shows, thatwewon’t need social distancing— certainly outdoors— by next summer,” he toldCNBC in early December.
He seemed to be anticipating a faster and broader vaccine distribution than has so far been established. But there are new vaccines in the pipeline, which could boost the supply considerably, and I have a lot of faith in the arrival of the competence cavalry, which could maybe push the timeline forward.
The third necessary condition that arts presenters talk about— beyond venue survival and medical intervention— is public confidence. Even if we all get the shots, even if the experts are telling us it’s nowsafe, they just don’t knowwhat it will take for folks to get past our new vision of what theworld is like.
For monthswe’ve thought, correctly, that every other personwe’ve met in public, at the grocery store or on a sidewalk, was a potential disease vector. We’ve started to recoil at crowd scenes in oldmovies, ones madeway back in 2019.
For a broad chunk of the population, turning off that switch might not be as simple as being told it is okay to do so. Some local museum officials I’ve talked to think it might be 2023 or 24 before they return to pre-pandemic revenue levels.
Or will that switch, that safety mechanism, be overwhelmed by the desire to get off the couches, out of the sweats and back into public? There is probably a reason, people keep pointing out, that the Roaring Twenties followed on the 1918-19 flu pandemic.
One thing is certain: There will be a lot of new art ready to greet people. Just as I have been busy working through theNetflix andHulu catalogs, many of our makers of creativework have been busy in recent months doing the thing they do.
I ameager to see what they’ve come up with— or, at this point, even to see some old dudes plying the greatest-hits circuits. See you at the SammyHagar show.