Whose Humanities?

In autumn 2020, the institutions of the humanities—universities, museums, arts organizations—remain in crisis. Yet the months of lockdown last spring were in some ways the most encouraging time for the humanities in years, if the attention paid to the classics of literature, visual art, and music was any measure. The Web was buzzing with news about what we could learn from literary classics ranging from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year to Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, as well as twentieth-century works like Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (one of the rare masterpieces to come out of the 1918 influenza pandemic) and the most celebrated of all in the season of COVID-19, Albert Camus’s The Plague. In art history, there was new poignancy in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death, Anthony van Dyke’s Santa Rosalie Interceding for the Plague Stricken of Palermo, and Edvard Munch’s 1919 paintings Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu and the more alarming Self-Portrait after the Spanish Flu. The Louvre’s website visits increased from 40,000 to 400,000 per day during the great museum’s shutdown. And the live broadcast of Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli’s Easter concert from the nearly empty Duomo Cathedral in Milan, which drew millions of viewers, was subsequently watched 41 million times more on YouTube.