This article discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts and cultural sector in the United States, placing the 2020 crises in the context of the United States’s historically decentralized approach to supporting the arts and culture. After providing an overview of the United States’s private, locally focused history of arts funding, we use this historical lens to analyze the combined effects of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement on a single metropolitan area – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace a timeline of key events in the national and local pandemic response and the reaction of the arts community to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that the nature of these intersecting responses, and their fallout for the arts and cultural sector, stem directly from weaknesses in the United States’s historical approach to administering the arts. We suggest that, in the context of widespread organizational vulnerability caused by the pandemic, the United States’s decentralized approach to funding culture also undermines cultural organizations’ abilities to respond to issues of public relevance and demonstrate their civic value, threatening these organizations’ legitimacy.

中文翻译：

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2020 年危机对美国艺术和文化的影响：历史背景下 COVID-19 和 Black Lives Matter 运动的影响

本文讨论了 COVID-19 大流行和 Black Lives Matter 运动对美国艺术和文化部门的影响，将 2020 年的危机置于美国历史上分散的支持艺术和文化的方法的背景下。在概述了美国私人的、以地方为中心的艺术资助历史之后，我们使用这个历史镜头来分析大流行和黑人生活问题运动对一个大都市区——宾夕法尼亚州费城的综合影响。我们追溯了国家和地方大流行应对中的关键事件以及艺术界对“黑人的命也是命”运动的反应的时间表，认为这些交叉反应的性质及其对艺术和文化部门的影响，直接源于美国管理艺术的历史方法的弱点。我们认为，在大流行导致组织普遍脆弱的背景下，美国对文化资助的分散化方式也削弱了文化组织应对公共相关问题和展示其公民价值的能力，从而威胁到这些组织的合法性。