Forum d´Avignon: Barbara Hendricks on art and truth

Famous soprano and UNHCR life ambassador Barbara Hendricks takes a worried, yet hopeful look into the future.  These days, artists face a lot of challenges: the demands in a digital world have changed, and performers have to cope with a new kind of self-conception as an entrepreneurial creative personality without losing their face. Does the cultural, the artistic mission get lost in that development?

At the Forum d`Avignon, the American-born Swedish artist talked about her very committed point of view and offered some practical advice.

The old story of the well-paid artist who just cares for the creative process and doesn’t want to be bothered with contracts, money, and paperwork at all, belongs to the past. If you want to have control over your creative work as an artist today, you have to think strategically, act as an entrepreneur, and have your own website.

 

When culture turns into mere business

But what does still stimulate and motivate an artist in this era of cultural economy and creative industry? Does the necessity of entrepreneurial thinking and multimedia-based self-marketing kill creativity?

There are many authors and songwriters who don’t bear up against this trend and the pressure today – they give up, and there are a lot of older artists ending up in poverty. Artists have to get something back to make them continue to work. And that can’t be paid with money: culture.

Or, as Barbara Hendricks describes this phenomenon: „A conversation about our human condition; and the sharing of that is absolutely essential to human life.“

 

Text: Boris Alexander Knop