Why we need the arts now more than ever: a conversation with journalists Kate Taylor and Simon Houpt

Following the suspension of arts events across the country — including the cancellation of the Stratford Festival’s 2020 season — The Socrates Project is exploring the question of why we need the arts now more than ever.

On May 6 at 7 p.m., novelist and long-time Globe and Mail journalist Kate Taylor will join  Globe and Mail senior media writer and former New York arts correspondent Simon Houpt in an online conversation around the power of art to provide meaning to an uncertain time.

“From the microscopic to the macro-economic, the pandemic is chewing its way through the arts,” Taylor wrote recently. “Yet, trapped inside our houses, it is to the arts that we turn: to novels, to recorded music, to movies and TV shows.”

According to Taylor, her conversation with Houpt will explore how the arts provide “the reassurance of narrative, magical thinking, mastery, the peace of contemplation and, most of all, the power of community, experiences that can be hard to define but which the current crisis is laying bare.”

With the Stratford Festival’s cancellation and the suspension of other events, the arts community has been shaken with reverberations and questions that extend far beyond the impact on those employed, directly or indirectly, by the festival and other arts organizations.

“We are quick to defend the arts as valuable economic drivers,” says Socrates Project event coordinator Correen Mascotto. “We are rarely as comfortable digging deeper. As the saying goes, not everything that counts can be counted.”

Join this important online discussion from 7-8:30 p.m on Wednesday, May 6. More information can be found on the Socrates Project website.