Dylon Harrison

Managing Editor

I’ve written about why arts are important in the past. It’s a topic that has always been very near to my heart. In fact, I wrote my senior paper on the subject in high school. However, I never would have been able to imagine how important they would be during a global pandemic.

At this point, we’ve been living with COVID-19 for about eight months. No doubt, during that time we’ve all found ourselves bored at some point. It’s likely that when we found ourselves bored, we turned to something to do with the arts to provide our entertainment, especially at the beginning of the pandemic when everything was closed and there were no sports.

Art and artists make up a huge part of our daily entertainment. Whether you’re listening to music, watching your favorite show, reading a book or playing a video game, artists are the reason that you are able to do so.

It is often easy to overlook the importance that the arts play in our society. I cannot count how many times in my life that I have heard arts referred to as just a hobby or heard an artist be told that they need a real job.

The simple truth of it is, a job in the arts is a real job. Millions of people are employed in some artistic occupation, and each piece of art we consume likely had a team of artists working towards the end result.

A perfect example of this can be found in the end credits of any movie. No one likes to watch the credits for movies because they take a long time to get through, but think about that. The reason they take so long is because an insane amount of people had to put in the time and effort to make that one movie happen.

For books and music, you obviously have the writer of whatever it is, but you don’t see the behind the scenes work of the editors, marketers, producers or the many other people that work on the project before it gets released to the public.

So many artists, especially live performance artists, have been without work since the pandemic started, and that is absolutely tragic. We rely on entertainment to get us through the day but forget about the people providing it when they are in need.

I’m a theatre major. I have friends that are out in the world trying to find jobs in the theatre industry as I sit writing this. Many of them can’t find work right now, and that has nothing to do with the talent they bring forth.

We all know that making a career in the arts is difficult. That’s why so many people don’t view it as a legitimate career path. The COVID-19 pandemic is only making it harder to make a living for those who choose to follow that path.

So I beg of you, as you sit at home in quarantine playing video games, watching Netflix, or listening to your favorite playlist while you work out, consider all of the artists that worked to make that an option for you.

Appreciate them. Thank them if you know them, and if you can, find ways to help artists who might be struggling to find work during these difficult times.