In a post-coronavirus world, the arts will never be the same.

The most to gain from this upheaval will be online services. This is evident from the fact that online retail giant, Amazon, has announced a huge number of recruitments to its workforce over rising demand.

The arts, too, will switch over to digital formats before we fully realize it. The nature of art’s communication with the audience will also undergo drastic change.

Live performances will suffer a lot and could cease altogether due to fear or state decrees. As a result of the devastation caused by the coronavirus in the world till date, the mere idea that a group of people will come together for any social or cultural gathering is now considered dangerous.

Traditionally, the greatest test for an artist, especially if he is in the performing arts, is that of a live performance. Both in music and theatre, it was the live performance that fully qualified a person to be critically assessed. For example, in our traditional music, the great test of a performance is the ability to improvise.

As there is no laid-down structure, a series of improvisations can determine the impact of a performance. The structure, if any, is skeletal and needs to be reinforced here and there. Obviously, the test is always in consonance with the feedback of the audiences. The artist and the audience crystallize together to give a definite form to the performance.

This interactive process has determined the quality of the art.

This interactive nature of the art was not obvious and there were no benchmarks attached to it. It was there and built in the nature of the performance. There were no obvious signs that could score or quantify the response, but it was there in the air, it was there in the atmospherics of the act, and it guaranteed the progression, development and denouement of the performance.

How will the post-corona world cope with its absence? There is a possibility that a vaccine will end this reign of fear and bring back the old lifestyles with people meeting and expressing themselves physically. It is this contact that qualifies relationships.

People coming together have always had a positive quality to it. However, even if a vaccine succeeds in bringing life back to normal some time in near future, the current void in the performing arts will be quickly filled by the digital juggernaut that is already well ahead of its time.

The digitised art will leave little breathing space for its traditional counterpart. Already, we see both managers and critics falling head over heels to catch up and usher in a new art culture. The trend is unlikely to reverse and is all set to be crowned and anointed as the new normal.

Music was all live performance before the advent of recording technology. In the last decade of the 19th century, companies were formed that recorded, preserved and disseminated music. The recorded duration of a performance was only about three minutes. However, a live performance had no limits and could continue as long as the audience loved it or an energetic artist could keep up. Even then, the three-minute barrier was a death knell for those who could not adjust.

The microphone did not prefer the full-throated sound meant to reach even the last row of the audience; it was better at catching nuance in a voice.

So, this controlled voice production embraced those with the new virtue. The composed portion, rather than the improvisation, became the benchmark. Hence bandish assumed importance. However, the two systems have managed to exist in parallel. Those who wanted to improvise and prove their musical ability in the older manner still had a wide field to express their talent and creativity.

What will happen if this option is taken away?

Even before this health crisis, there have been singers and musicians who are not real persons. One of Japan’s biggest pop stars, Hatsune Miku, is not a real person. This does not prevent the humanoid singer from releasing new music videos. Similarly, Roy Orbison died in 1988, but his 3D hologram recently went on a world tour alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Music-making was actually working together and evolving a piece of music. It was the result of a shared vision and a joint aesthetic output that was the consequence of pooling in artistic resources. Some musicians collaborated without actually meeting one another - one could be in one city and the other in some other city, thousands of miles away.

The new world will bring in new standards and critical canons.There will certainly be a mourning period over the obvious loss of quality.

Software-driven invasive technologies have already made the human application of the voice note secondary to its cold corrective mediations.

While history clearly points to what is in store for artists who fail to change, the question remains: do scientific inventions and resultant technologies arise out of a certain cultural dispensation and are thus coloured in their hue, or are these neutral, like a clean slate, to be scribbled on by all?