How to help struggling artists – and take in some great culture

Music

Back in the music industry’s 1990s boom, when tenner-a-pop CD sales were skyrocketing, going on tour was a good way of shifting more product. After digital piracy burst that bubble in the early 2000s, however, touring became more of a financial necessity, creating a new, lopsided business model only accentuated in recent years by the rise of subscription streaming services. With gigs and festivals essentially banned under new measures to stave off the spread of coronavirus, how can we help artists who can no longer tour?

Readers of a certain age will remember the thrill of holding an album in their hands but, guess what? They still make physical product! Vinyl sales are booming, you can still buy CDs and – in nostalgia news – cassettes are back, too. If there is nothing that immediately takes your fancy, maybe buy a voucher from an independent online retailer for later. Or, if your favourite act has recently put out a not-at-that-price lavish box set, such as Björk’s Utopia collection featuring 14 handmade bird call flutes, or Depeche Mode’s MODE, in which all 14 of their albums come housed in an elegant black cube, now might be the best time to treat yourself to a day’s worth of B-sides, remixes and forgotten radio sessions.

The rise in touring has also meant a rise in merch, most of which is readily available directly from artist’s official websites, and has evolved to include not just T-shirts and caps, but tote bags (lo-fi pop experimentalists Girl Ray have a particularly fetching pink lipstick one), pillows (including a very sweary Cupcakke one), socks adorned with Aussie DJ and producer Flume’s name, FKA twigs shoelaces and – with time on our hands, why not – sex toys from the likes of Marilyn Manson and Sophie. Or, if your fave act is too cool for an official online shop, try Bandcamp, which only takes 10% for merch and music sales, and doesn’t charge artists to upload their music in the first place (the site has also started waiving its revenue share completely on certain days to boost direct sales for artists).

The knock-on effect for future tours and festivals looks grim, but at least with the shows that have already been postponed financial losses can be sutured if people keep hold of their tickets where possible, rather than asking for a refund from promoters that likely don’t have the money any more. If classical music is more your thing, then you could spend a lockdown night at the opera (Opera North’s acclaimed Ring cycle is on its website), or how about soothing your fears with the London Symphony Orchestra, who are streaming full-length concerts every Sunday and Thursday evening. And, if more acts are going guerrilla and doing online “gigs” – as pop newcomers L Devine and Yungblud have done recently – then let’s all pop a dressing gown on and get involved. A sense of community is what we need right now.

MC

Theatre

Outside the Royal Court theatre in London, the play banner reads: “Back soon”. At the Battersea Arts Centre, a new sign reads: “Hope”. Theatres have temporarily gone dark, but the response from the theatre industry has been swift, optimistic and tirelessly creative.

A number of online theatrical enterprises have already emerged. The Show Must Go On will see the complete plays of Shakespeare read live on YouTube. A festival of musical concerts are to be streamed live from London’s Theatre Café, and Notflix – featuring some of the UK’s top female improvisers – will be performed on Facebook live throughout spring.

Enterprising artists are moving their work online. Christopher Green’s No Show, about a performer who would rather stay at home than perform live, streams on the web-conferencing platform Zoom in March and April. The bods behind Showstopper! The Improvised Musical filmed one of their last productions before the shutdown. Kieran Hurley’s Bubble is streaming until 23 April: it was rehearsed and recorded on Skype, is set entirely on Facebook and is written in text-speak and emoji.

Theatres are working hard to support their emerging artists. The King’s Head, Papatango, Southwark Playhouse and Luton’s Next Generation Youth Theatre are offering a selection of online advice sessions, workshops, play-reading clubs and choreography courses. The Bruntwood prize website includes interviews, mini-plays and live-recorded workshops by David Eldridge, Jo Clifford and Winsome Pinnock. (Bruntwood recently received an email from a woman in lockdown in Italy, delighted to be able to “learn things that would otherwise be unreachable”.) All the Web’s a Stage will feature a variety of live performances to raise money for artists struggling during the pandemic. The BBC has launched a virtual festival of arts, and Manchester’s HOME has launched a range of online theatrical experiences, including new work from Chris Thorpe and Bryony Kimmings.

The National Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe have particularly brilliant online catalogues. Bloomsbury’s Drama Online is a treasure trove for students, and LIVR – which provides recorded theatre in 360° VR – is available for a subscription fee. Amazon Prime also includes a healthy selection of live-recorded theatre, including Rent, Company, Billy Elliot and Cats. And yes, it’s the Elaine Paige Cats. And yes, it’s heaps better than the film.

MG

Art

When gallery doors shut, art fairs are cancelled and public space empties, survival for many artists looks tough. Ordinarily, most make ends meet via a tangled web of teaching gigs, squeezed funding bodies, public projects and, sometimes, selling work. Can art lovers help out?

Art dealers have sold to those with deep pockets on the strength of Jpegs for a long while. So, if you are a wealthy collector, keep buying. For everyone else, the good news is that there are ways you can support artists and experience new work from the safety of your living room. Artist’s prints, individually made books and other editions are often touted as a collector entry point. Art book publisher Phaidon’s platform Artspace has a bit of everything, with art historical greats for sale alongside newbies.

Another way to help protect the system artists depend on is to buy works specially created to support not-for-profit public spaces. Cubitt, the cutting-edge gallery and artists’ studios in Islington, north London, sells everything from a tote bag to a £3,000 print box online. Among the editioned prints at Bristol’s Spike Island, Andy Holden’s Lecture on Nesting – with its cocoon-building birds – offers apt imagery for days indoors. Available through BALTIC in Gateshead, top painter George Shaw’s prints circle the housing estate where he grew up.

But sales are just one part of art’s fragile ecology. Spreading ideas and keeping people engaged is essential. Commercial galleries, from international big gun Pace to smaller operations such as London’s Kate MacGarry are now organising shows and talks online. The charity Art UK, meanwhile, is inviting everyone to curate their own virtual exhibitions from the 216,000+ artworks it lists from the UK’s public collections. For original digital art commissions, there are a few institutions that have long led the way in terms of what is achievable in the virtual world. Among the Serpentine Galleries’ current web projects, you can navigate Suzanne Treister’s The Escapist BHST (Black Hole Space Time). With its promise of inter-dimensional travel to see painting archives in new universes via your computer screen, The Escapist … certainly feels like art for our housebound moment.

SS

Comedy

Comedians are uniquely exposed by the outbreak. Their counterparts in theatre and music, visual art and dance have received words of support – with actions promised to follow – from the Arts Council of England and other organisations that exist to support them. Not so comics, whose work – individualistic, largely unregulated and mostly funded by ticket sales – is not recognised by the arts bodies.

The flipside is that they may be more entrepreneurial than practitioners of other artforms. They are certainly well versed already in retooling their skills for digital media. The dictum about a technology only really existing once it is used to create porn could equally be said of comedy. In the time since the Covid-19 shutdown, there has been an uptick in the number of comics making material available online. If you want to help out struggling standups, look no further than NextUp, the so-called “Netflix for British standup” which has nearly 200 downloadable sets from the cream of fringe comedy – and shares revenue from downloads directly with performers.

Comedian and activist Mark Thomas has launched another streaming initiative with the DVD label Go Faster Stripe. Each week, a comic will have one of their standup specials broadcast for free in exchange for a donation to the crisis-relief charity the Trussell Trust. One of the acts signed up is Richard Herring, who has also contributed to NextUp’s #hecklethevirus crowdfunder to help comedians stay afloat during the pandemic. At time of writing, it had raised £81K of an initial £100K target.

Trading in moral support, if not yet money, the indie comedy producers Berk’s Nest and Fight in the Dog are offering advice sessions for the comedy industry using Zoom. Several of their acts, meanwhile, are likely to be appearing on Robin Ince’s hastily cobbled together Stay at Home festival, a daily (sometimes twice daily) livestream promising chat and entertainment from comics, scientists and artists, Chris Hadfield, Sara Pascoe, Mark Gatiss, Jo Brand and Prof Brian Cox among them. It is free to watch, but donations are requested for “performers and venues most in need in these difficult times”.

BL