Throwing Edward Colston’s statue in the Avon was the cultural event of the year

Digital culture can’t compete with real culture, says Mark Hudson

The statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston being thrown in the river was one of the ‘great cultural events of the pandemic era’ (Keir Gravil via Reuters)

Anyone remember pictures of rainbows in eerily deserted streets? Banging pans “for the NHS” on a Thursday evening while wondering quite who was benefiting? Or that strange evening on 8 May, when millions tuned in to see Vera Lynn and all those wonderful Second World War veterans commemorating VE day – an event that felt weirdly closer in time than the pre-lockdown days of just two months before? Yes, I’m referring to the First Great Covid Lockdown, a period of barely three months, during which we were endlessly told that the world had changed “for ever”. It was a time when we felt we were living the future as it would actually be: a world in which most things, work included, took place “at home”, and culture would be accessed entirely digitally, with art galleries entered only through virtual tours, and all live music, from symphonies to heavy metal, heard via Zoom or its equivalents.

Now that we’re in the Second Lockdown, but with the prospect of a vaccine sometime soon, the First Lockdown can be seen as a self-contained historical event, a moment that imposed a set of conditions we won’t be going back to – or certainly not in quite that form. While there’s little appetite for pan-banging this time around (though we all know those frontline workers need a pay rise), and there’s an increasing awareness that the First Lockdown wasn’t perhaps the “most momentous event of our lives” we felt it was at the time, we learned an enormous amount from it. From the point of view of culture, we gleaned that the entirely digitally enabled existence – promised since the dawn of the internet – where there’s no need to go to the shops, and all entertainment and ideas come to you via personal screens, is an emotionally challenging half-life.

It rapidly became evident that virtual gallery tours are a bore and that when you’ve seen one performance of Beethoven’s Fifth played on kazoos from 30 different sitting rooms in the Home Counties simultaneously via Zoom, you’ve seen them all.

By June, as the prospect of galleries reopening became imminent, people most definitely weren’t buying the idea that the arts would now be absorbed largely via phones, iPads and the family desktop. The big galleries and other arts institutions may have been preparing to put a larger share of their increasingly hard-pressed resources into digital consumption, but the consumers themselves were desperate to get back into real, actual art galleries with tangible, physical stuff like paint, bronze and marble, and then move on – and as soon as possible – to theatres, concert halls and rock venues.

In Norman Foster’s projections for the post-Covid world, on view in the currently locked-down Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Britain’s leading architect predicts that “Covid-19 will hasten existing trends [but] will not create new trends”. If the rise of digital culture saw a counter-reaction in the premium placed on the “real experience” offered by live events – concerts, theatre, comedy – this tendency has been massively magnified by the lockdown malaise. After months shut into your bubble, experiencing music solely through the synthetic compression of the MP3, the prospect of hearing over-amplified guitar music while being jostled by people with questionable hygiene who you “don’t know” feels dizzyingly enticing.

If that prospect still feels a way off, old school venues for communal experience are coming back into their own everywhere. Pubs, long seen as a disappearing phenomenon, are packed; parks have brimmed over with picnics and football matches in a loved-up atmosphere – mostly responsibly distanced – that makes Woodstock look tepid.

Despite a plethora of mostly piffling internet-based art projects – Damien Hirst’s butterfly rainbow (“for the NHS”) and Grayson’s Art Club being prime offenders – the great cultural events of the pandemic era, such as throwing Bristol slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in the River Avon (and yes, it was a cultural event), have been live ones.

The fact that you may not now easily recall quite how the great Black Lives Matter moment overlapped with the Covid moment is an example of how time under pandemic conditions has felt at once constricted and endlessly elastic – a temporal relativism that the culture consumer soon longed to escape.

Damien Hirst’s ‘Butterfly Rainbow’ artwork (PA)

In the first days of the lockdown, listing the albums that “most influenced your listening tastes” on Facebook or exhibiting old concert ticket stubs on Instagram was a pleasant way to pass the time, when there was still a degree of novelty in sitting at home feeling comfortably numb. Rapidly, however, the number of “likes” dropped and you started to rebel, not only against the weird out-of-timeness of lockdown but against the whole time-tunnel culture – when you’re weirdly stuck in your teenage tastes – that has been fostered by YouTube and Facebook. There’s nothing like the possibility of being deprived of a “now” to make you seize the one you’ve got with both hands.

This carpe diem approach to lockdown culture isn’t, of course, for everyone. For every person heading to the park each day, there are – I’m told – two more mainlining a TV series at home, on Netflix or another streaming service. And I’m not for a moment making light of the concerns of those still shielding for legitimate reasons, or of the fact that tens of thousands of people have died. Yet the full sense of that loss hasn’t really hit home, competing as it does with the exigencies of simply keeping going.

As we start to see some sort of light at the end of the medical tunnel, while facing a cataclysmic economic recession, one thing is certain: the role of the arts and culture in understanding who we are and in making sense of where we’re going will be more important than ever in the post-Covid world.