Creativity must trump Covid-19

Dubai - It is a fact that unless the rich and the powerful stand by the arts and those who patronise it, the great expression of mankind will shrink and shrivel.

My wife discovered a gift voucher under her clothes given last year, but just narrowly valid. Of such things are excitements made in our home. She went online and bought a karaoke machine. Why would you do that, I asked, as vision of high-decibel caterwauling catapulted through my mind. Even if she was once a trained singer, how can this warbling be conducive to working from home? But it did strike me that the artistic vein is throbbing in all of us, activated by the hours hanging heavy on the hand. Whether it is writing or drawing or playing the piano and scribbling poetry, a lot of us have been reviving our slivers of talent. I say slivers because there is a great deal of comeuppance in all this rediscovery. Your drawings are awful, your writing is trite, the poetry, like Henry the VII's, sour and dull-witted and the music raucous and out of synch. So you thought you had talent. Go read a book, it is quieter.

But on a more serious note, have the arts flourished in these past three months or are they languishing because the patronage has dried up? It is a fact that unless the rich and the powerful stand by the arts and those who patronise it, the great expression of mankind will shrink and shrivel.

Yes, indeed, the charity shows and the telethons and music-thons and online streaming concerts have been absorbing and fun to watch, but this is not a contribution to creativity. Thanks to this virus and its staying power theatre is on the down, you cannot get together for rehearsals and feed off each other. There is no art on display. And even the most diehard advocate of online digital interaction will agree the arts become puny on a 6-inch screen. You cannot very well watch 'Hamilton' or 'The Book of Mormon' on your mobile and get the same thrill as seeing the plays in real life and absorbing the incredible human endeavour that goes into these performances.

Would you rather Simon and Garfunkel in Central Park or A.R. Rahman at the Coca-Cola stadium here in Dubai or their recordings on the telly?

In the aftermath what we will need is deep pockets to pull in the slack and ensure that the spirit of creativity is given a boost because it is this ability to articulate thought, capture the power of music and the cadence of rhyme, the flowing strokes of genius on canvas that make us civilized.

So I said to my wife, get a good machine even if it costs a little more, who knows we might make magic.