Love the arts, but not people? Tim Robey knows how you feel. The Telegraph’s Film Critic has thrown his proverbial hat into the ring regarding the advent of socially distanced arts, and unlike so many of his peers, he is quite delighted by the prospect.
A trip to the cinema, he says, now means: “You won’t need to fight for a decent view or put up with the person behind you kicking your seat – there won’t be one. You can isolate, splendidly, as a human island.”
Robey, who has been more accustomed to press screenings than a casual trip to the Odeon, believes that now, the latter will resemble the former. He argues that social distancing will improve cinema etiquette, or at least provide sufficient distance between you and whoever is performing those indiscretions.
As for galleries, Robey muses, they will seem more and more like a religious experience. On the final pre-lockdown days, he says: “I saw most of McQueen’s short films with no one passing anywhere near me. It was like communion – sacred and strange.”
Indeed, he hopes that, for just a little while, we can view the arts in peace and quiet. For, according to the critic: “It can bring on a reverie, like going for a solitary walk. It unlocks the imagination.”
Yet Robey concludes that: “Buzz and hoopla and neck-craning will return to our galleries in time, just as a raucous collective experience will be had again at the cinema when we’re fully acclimatised to a Covid-free world. Indeed, the survival of whole institutions – whole art forms – depends on this.” Perhaps crowds aren’t so bad, after all.
