Masashi Takahashi: Thanks for giving us this opportunity Jean-Michel. We paid careful attention to your Unesco ResiliArt debate on April 15, and were impressed by what you said.
Can you summarise your thoughts about the effects of the pandemic on culture – and suggest some ways forward?
Jean-Michel Jarre: Half of the planet has been in confinement, in isolation – and we did two things. We went out for food and healthcare, and we listened to music, we watched movies and we read books. Culture became as important for minds and souls as food… We became more aware of our respect for doctors and nurses. [But] we should also respect our relationship with culture in general more.
With the development of the internet, we suddenly took culture for granted. [We thought] that culture should be as free as the air we are breathing. And the big giants of the internet were making money because of the virus in a sense, by providing content created by authors and creators who are in dire straits and great difficulties.
The good thing would be to take advantage of this crisis, to think about how to create and invent a new economy for culture and to realise that if we don’t do anything, probably fifty percent of culture worldwide may disappear. It’s even truer for emerging countries in Africa, South America or South Asia where artists are even more vulnerable. This is a global issue.
We can’t expect that governments will solve everything... We have to find other ways, probably first of all with the artists, the creators, our job is to be creative so in these moments we have to think differently.
It’s a little bit like after a war. After each war, you have people thinking differently. You could take the example of Japan. After the Second World War when the country was in a very tragic and dark state, suddenly you had a new generation of artists thinking differently. It gave us Butoh, it gave us artists such as Mishima and Kurosawa, suddenly all these artists were taking advantage of the tragedy of war to try to express themselves in a different way. Fortunately our days are not as dark as those, but it’s just an example to see that after a crisis, there is sometimes a window to try to change our perspectives.
This is something that we should also address to the internet platforms. We should really think about asking them in a very firm way, maybe through governments, for a special tax, a special contribution for helping artists. All these platforms are making billions of dollars on our content, they should [contribute] because solidarity and righteousness is also their duty.
But to go back to the idea of trying to be creative, I would give you two examples. One is from a very small country, Cape Verde. During the crisis they suddenly created a system where you had paid concerts on the internet from DJs and musicians. It’s a very good example of how to monetize our creativity in the digital age.
Another example is something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while and I’ve talked about it for quite a few years since I was elected president of CISAC (the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers), when copyright and the idea of intellectual property was really being questioned. Instead of trying to cancel the idea of intellectual property and the concept of copyright, why not go the other way around?
What if, after a certain number of years, instead of having music or movies going into the public domain, the rights went into a global fund to help creators and new generations of authors? In Europe, for instance, the national anthem is ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Each time this piece of music is played, the rights could go to help European artists.
This would help contribute to adjusting the absolutely unfair situation of authors these days because as we know with Covid-19, suddenly activity has stopped not only for artists, but for technicians, for festivals, for museums, for shooting movies and so on and so forth.
