The Arts in 2025

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In July and November 2020, UK New Artists teamed up with Voicemag to host online discussions about the future of the arts industry. Unlike many similar conversations at this time, this was not about the impact of Covid or Brexit, lockdown or social distancing, but instead about the ways in which the arts must become more sustainable, environmental and accessible in order to grow and flourish over the next five years. 

We invited three of our alumni artists and a collection of 14-20yr olds to explore intentionally provocative, questions around the future of the arts. We did not seek to find answers (if such a thing could ever be found!), but to open up the conversation and explore the different ways each issue can be addressed. The question that interested us most as a group:

With an ever escalating climate emergency what will international arts look like in 2025? Do you think international touring exhibitions/live shows are ethical or indeed necessary?

We pushed ourselves to explore what that would mean - does a stadium concert tour, with a travelling team of 300+ and accompanying equipment lorries need to visit 100+ venues across the globe when you can listen to the music/watch the show from the comfort of your home? Do enormous sculptures need to be shipped to galleries across the seas when so many are offering virtual tours? Do 30k people need to fly to Cannes every year to experience films, talks and exhibitions that could be experienced in a similar way online? Does an aspiring artist need to spend a week in Barcelona in order to be inspired by Gaudi when they could experience VR tours?

I’m afraid we didn’t find any answers. But we did have counter questions - how poorer would our cultural lives be without access to such a wide range of live artistic experiences? How many venues, particularly in smaller cities and more rural settings, would close because there just isn’t the diversity of events to encourage a large enough audience to be cost effective? How many artists have been inspired to become so by experiencing the magic of a live orchestral concert or seeing the Michelanglo’s David or standing in the interior of the Sagrada Familia and how many would never have become artists without those experiences? How dangerous is it to rely so heavily on the internet for shared artistic experiences? 

These examples are obviously in no way representative of the entire international arts industry but they are important questions that will dictate how we attempt to balance the importance of artistic experiences with the necessity to confront the ever growing climate emergency. Although we didn’t find any concrete answers to any of the above questions, what we did agree on was that international opportunities are paramount, for everyone, not just in an artistic setting. Only by spending time in other places and spaces can we hope to explore, experience, understand, reflect and represent the world, its culture and its peoples. 

This project was kindly supported by Eurodesk UK.