Creativity has been severely hit by the pandemic. The future of the creative sector, as well the future of arts in the short or medium term, depends largely on the management of opportunities that we do now.
This negative influence has brought the following consequences:
- Serious crisis in the market. The confinement and the economic crisis has caused an unprecedented crisis in the consumer market for creative and/or artistic products. This, in turn, has caused a paradigm shift, where now Internet is no longer just a collaborative communication channel, but the market itself; at the same time that it has become an essential work tool at all levels.
- Serious business crisis. Most of the creative and artistic sector is made up of small and medium-sized companies that have been the first victims of the market reduction, and of the impossibility of carrying out their usual activity in the conditions necessary for their activities; defined for a reality prior to the pandemic.
- Impossibility of developing creativity. Creativity, both understood as a concept, and also understood as an inalienable cultural current in today’s Europe, sees two key sources for its development at risk:
- The development of creative competences, and the development of all the associated learning, has stopped as it cannot be carried out in a face-to-face context, for most of the fields and the arts.
- The general culture in Europe, and the creative trends that it can -and should- generate, are now in danger because they are totally conditioned by these previous circumstances. The limitations to personal work, as well as to the development of creative/artistic projects, will imply a strong impact and bias in the existing creative fields, and their contributions in the short and medium term; totally limiting the free circulation of ideas, artistic currents, and new points of view.
Therefore, we need to reflect on the important moment that we are living, not only from a labour and business perspective, but also from a totally creative point of view, faced with a challenge and a danger that can modify our perspective and potential culture in the coming years.
That culture will be the direct consequence of everything we do from now on.