Art is created in the eye of the beholder. With his provocative 4'33", the American composer John Cage already made clear in the 1950s: only hearing
makes the audible music. Seeing and hearing, comprehending and appreciating are to be understood as achievements of civilization. The composer Jean Sibelius puts it in a nutshell: "Art is the signature of civilization." The reverse conclusion is obvious: In times of Covid-19, this signature fades, civilization loses its contour. And perhaps we awaken after a long period of existence as screen existences in Michael Ende's "never-ending story": in the fading of civilization and its imaginative power. All the more encouraging are the countless initiatives and activities of artists against silencing and disappearance. They find support in the media, the fourth estate in the state, which celebrates the urgently needed perception in the best possible way and thus
offers survival to
the
ordained silencing of art. Monument! Our language is also full of images and makes you take notice, it gives information about short-term thinking in crisis situations
and the mindset behind it. The "system relevance", for example, raises several questions at once: What does "system," a term usually associated with totalitarian states, mean in this context? And
in case "system" here stands for society or health, what does the exclusion of education and culture from "system relevance" signal to us? That negative tests are to be regarded as positive is
probably not adopted in the education system and the Anglicisms Distance Learning, Homeschooling or Homeoffice can only be translated into German with difficulty
:
Working from home sounds dusty, dis- dance teaching or distance mode are
linguistically opposed
to internalizing or appropriating learning content
. We keep our distance and zoom in on privacy. But how much closeness can we tolerate and how much distance do we need? Between isolation and exposure stands a nice
baby elephant as a Pokémon figure. Really? the need for protection urgently needs to be re-examined because what is at stake here is the mental health of our society and thus its future viability.
In the artistic process of making audible intermediate sounds and silences, of making visible interstices and emptiness, of walking on counter-worlds and interrogating counter-algorithms, a reconquest of world can take place that has been blanked out in the noise of the crisis mode. When Goethe holds up art as a mediator of the ineffable, he means exactly that. Artistic creation, creativity, culture expand our realities of life and with it the possibility of diversity in communities. Moreover, worth noting: A recently published study on cultural and creative industries before and after Covid-19, conducted by Ernst & Young in close collaboration with GESAC, an association of 32 European Collecting Societies, entitled "Rebuilding Europe," shows the economic gravity of this sector and the high growth potential that became visible in the years 2013 to 2019. With a trade balance of 8.6 billion euros (2019) and 7.6 million jobs, the K&K economy is or has been a significant sector. in 2020, sales plummeted by an estimated 31 percent, with theater (-90 percent) and music (-76 percent) by far the hardest hit. The study concludes that the crisis will have a massive and lasting impact on the entire value chain of the cultural and creative industries and presents a three-step plan to meet the challenge of "Rebuilding Europe." Rebuilding this field means also rebuilding our civilization as a normative force of our self-understanding. The current generation of students must participate in this rebuilding, as a university we should back them up. " Art is what you can get away with ." - Andy Warhol (First published in Uni-Nachrichten / Salzburger Nachrichten on March 1, 2021)
