Leslie Forrester, Executive Director of the Springfield Regional Arts Council, visited KSMU’s “Arts News” to promote the Arts Council’s 2023 “$100 and Under Holiday Art Market,” taking place during the First Friday Art Walk on December 1 at the Springfield Art Museum (1111 E. Brookside Drive) from 5 to 8 p.m.

This event showcases the talent of 30 local artists, featuring an eclectic mix of media, styles and forms. Attendees can expect to find a variety of affordable art pieces, perfect for holiday gift-giving or adding a touch of creativity to their own spaces. Media include ceramic art and pottery, photography, paintings and prints, woodturning, jewelry, leather goods, handmade lifestyle bags (e.g., fanny packs, crossbody, bike bags), cards, books, sculptural and ornamental pieces.

It’s not just a market; it’s a celebration of local creativity and craftsmanship. Admission is free and open to the public. For information visit springfieldarts.org or follow the Arts Council at @springfieldarts.

NEW YORK, Nov. 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — The Ad Council announced today that Corrina Greenberg has joined the organization as Chief Revenue and Development Officer. She succeeds Barbara Leshinsky, who will be retiring in December after leading the Development team for 19 years. Prior to joining the Ad Council, Greenberg was Vice President of Development at New York Public Radio, leading the organization’s philanthropic fundraising efforts.

In her new role, Greenberg will oversee the Ad Council’s Development team and its fundraising efforts. Additionally, Greenberg will manage the Ad Council’s Board of Directors, comprised of a prestigious group of senior marketing, media and business executives who provide expertise, insights and financial support to ensure the Ad Council’s social impact campaigns are effective and drive measurable change.

“I am thrilled to welcome Corrina to the team. She has a proven track record of success in securing major gifts and transforming donor relationships into meaningful partnerships,” said Lisa Sherman, President and CEO of the Ad Council. “Corrina is a strategic, forward-thinking and inclusive leader, and her expertise and passion for social impact exemplify our mission and values.”

Greenberg has over 20 years of experience as a fundraising leader. As Vice President of Development at New York Public Radio, she led sustainable revenue streams, cultivating a culture of stewardship across departments, and deepening engagement with the donor community. She worked closely with the Board of Trustees, overseeing major gifts, institutional giving, planned gifts, special events and campaign functions.

“I am deeply inspired by the powerful work of the Ad Council to unite and inform our country,” said Greenberg. “It is a sincere honor to have the opportunity to collaborate with Lisa and join the incredible team helping to shape the current and future growth of the organization.”

Greenberg joined New York Public Radio in 2015. Throughout her career, she held positions at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, The Museum of Modern Art, Park Avenue Armory, and The Rockefeller University. She holds a BS in Communications from Boston University and has previously served on the boards of Housing Works Bookstore and Voices in Contemporary Art.

The Ad Council
The Ad Council convenes creative storytellers to educate, unite and uplift audiences by opening hearts, inspiring action and accelerating change around the most pressing issues in America. Since the non-profit’s founding, the organization and its partners in advertising, media, marketing and tech have been behind some of the country’s most iconic social impact campaigns – Smokey Bear, A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste, Love Has No Labels, Tear the Paper Ceiling and many more. With a current focus on mental health, gun safety, the opioid epidemic, skill-based hiring and other critical issues, the Ad Council’s national campaigns encompass advertising and media content, ground game and community efforts, trusted messenger and influencer engagement, and employer programs, among other innovative strategies to move the needle on the most important issues of the day. 

To learn more or get involved, visit AdCouncil.org, join the Ad Council’s communities on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X, and view campaign creative on YouTube.

SOURCE The Ad Council

Alongside Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Shop Small Saturday, many downtown businesses this weekend in Longmont celebrated Artist Sunday, a nationwide movement encouraging consumers to buy local art.

The Firehouse Art Center, 667 4th Ave., was one of a few businesses celebrating local artists through its Holiday Market where over 15 artists gathered at the gallery to sell one-of-a-kind pieces — ranging from ceramics, paintings and drawings to jewelry and found art works.

Marjorie Lipton, a volunteer at Firehouse, was displaying her mosaic pieces while creating new works live. Lipton’s art is abstract, as she forms a painting with a layer of cracked glass on top, which she said is like piecing together a puzzle. Each one of her glass mosaic pieces can take up to 15 hours to create, as she fiddles with pieces to fit together.

“I go outside and I see the colors, and I put those colors into the painting,” Lipton said.

She loves to take pictures of nature, as she draws inspiration from the outdoors. She said her work celebrates the same colors found in nature while also combining her love of mosaics.

Valerie Langlois said she loves to paint and draw on pottery. Many of Langlois’ pieces had winsome frogs, cows, bunnies or flowers etched on them. She is a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, and she said pottery has been her way to relax and escape her hectic full-time job.

Langlois said the Artist Sunday event gave her a chance to meet new artists and to be exposed to many different art mediums.

“This community has a lot to offer and show,” Langlois said. “Looking around, I’m just in awe and inspired by everyone’s art here.”

Participating artist Kylee Covili creates found-object art, where she repurposes a variety of materials for her pieces. Covili said she loves using “old stuff” to give her work a vintage and old-timey feeling. She said her brain loves to imagine different ways to use objects.

Covili said these events that celebrate local artists are one of the key ways artists can support themselves and display their work. She also noted the celebration of artists is crucial to fostering a creative community.

Participating artist Katheryn Babboni said her jewelry demonstrates every skill she has as she learned it. She said she loves to create unique pieces she has not seen before.

“Longmont would not be anything without its artists. And I feel that way about Boulder and surrounding areas too,” Babboni said.

Babboni is new to Longmont, and joining the Firehouse event allowed her to meet new people with common interests.

Participating artist Amanda Maldonado agreed with Babboni. They both said the world would be “blah” without artists creating and contributing to music, literature, clothing and — most importantly — community.

Longmont-based Maldonado, who operates Coy Ink Studio, started sketching animals as a way to simply draw things she loved. This grew into drawing places around Longmont as she fell in love with the city.

“Just getting out and seeing what people do is enough, even if they don’t buy anything. Seeing work and telling people they’re awesome is enough for most artists, so they feel seen and have a reason to create,”  Maldonado said.

She added people love local artists because the customer can talk to the artist and has maybe even gone to the place that inspired their work.

A hand-painted window sign greets customers as they enter The Beautiful Idea, a new trans-owned bookshop and makers’ market on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. Wedged between a boutique and a CBD dispensary, the store sells artwork from over twenty small businesses run by LGBTQ+ artists into a colorful, brick-and-mortar home.

The Beautiful Idea is a condensed indoor art market in the front, selling everything from political zines and fruit-themed embroidery hoops to beadwork earrings and pronoun button pins. Behind the shelves of artwork lies a bookstore with memoirs, LGBTQ+ history books, antifascist literature and radical fiction.

Just two months after its opening, customers and community members — including Anthony Lerner, one of the store’s regulars — have come to appreciate the inviting atmosphere of the space.

“When I go into The Beautiful Idea, I see friends and many folks such as myself who are wanting to connect and hang with others in a visibly trans-owned, queer and anti-fascist store,” Lerner said. “To go to a store [where] I know trans and queerness are not just safe and accepted, but a central focus with intention and care behind it, allows me to feel like I myself can start to claim space too.”

According to co-owner Ellie Picard, at its core, The Beautiful Idea centers on trans visibility, queer community and a resistance to oppression that Picard calls “lived antifascism.” 

“Queer folks [and] marginalized folks face this particular kind of everyday fascism — efforts to control who we are, how we express ourselves and to stamp out that kind of variation and queerness itself,” Picard said. “Queer antifascism has always been about that fight that we have to fight every single day just to exist and to thrive.”

The store opened its doors on Sept. 17 of this year, a date Picard and her co-owners Senlin Means, Dylan West and Joan Covatch deliberately chose to align with the Cville Pride festival. An annual celebration of the LGBTQ+ community in Charlottesville, Cville Pride features queer food vendors, artists, and nonprofits in booths sprinkled across Ix Art Park.

“It would have been nice to have a little extra time,” West said. “But it felt important to have that crossover. We did it, and people were so thrilled.”

West calls the experience of running a trans-owned business in Downtown Charlottesville “magical.” Since its September opening, The Beautiful Idea has been embraced by the Charlottesville community — an overwhelmingly positive reaction that surpassed the owners’ expectations.

Seeing four visibly trans business owners makes a difference to younger customers, said Means, presenting trans youth who visit The Beautiful Idea with examples of successful trans adults.

“It’s really amazing and unique to walk into a space and see someone who’s trans behind the counter and know that they own it, and that this place is totally safe — and not just safe, celebrates you,” Means said.

Featuring merchandise from a diverse array of local LGBTQ+ vendors, The Beautiful Idea overflows with art of virtually every medium. Candy-colored enamel pins by Lucky Hodgepodge share a shelf with sparkly resin ashtrays by Angry Black Gxrl Art, body-inclusive vases by Griot Goods and pride-flag frog stickers by Wednesday’s Whimsies.

“Gender is like the universe / Constantly expanding,” reads one starry print. The genesis of Picard, Means, West and Covatch’s business has also been a story of expansion as the owners’ idea to centralize the LGBTQ+ community in a physical space became a reality.

“It’s important to highlight that aspect of the business in the store, make sure that it’s as visible as possible,” Picard said. “People need to see [trans identity] because they need that example

in their life, because they have sort of a beacon of safety and possibility.”

The business began as the F-12 Infoshop, an antifascist bookstore located within an art gallery in a converted warehouse in the Woolen Mills neighborhood. Picard and Means, who ran the shop, decided to move the infoshop to a new location with more breathing room and foot traffic.

“We wanted to partner with another like-minded business that was successful and that we felt could carry something with us,” Means said of the F-12 Infoshop’s relocation to the Downtown Mall.

Picard reached out to Dylan West of Critter Butts, a line of block printed art and apparel owned by West and their partner, Joan Covatch. The couple’s humorous, LGBTQ+-focused designs feature absurdist iconography such as the rear end of a skunk and the phrase “Be Gay Do Crimes.”

“We couldn’t say no,” said West, who brought experience and connections from their time selling at LGBTQ+ art markets in the Charlottesville and Richmond areas.

The F-12 Infoshop and Critter Butts combined to create The Beautiful Idea, and the four owners brought in sixteen vendors from their artists’ network to rent space in the store. They later began renting space to other vendors, some of whom had never had an opportunity to market their art.

“Having a space where people who maybe aren’t physically or financially able to be at a market — this is a really great place to just have your stuff,” West said. “[Selling at The Beautiful Idea] is a really low-pressure way to dip your toe in if you’re not sure about getting out there.”

The owners shared stories of customers who visit The Beautiful Idea simply to exist in the space, which provides a unique outlet for LGBTQ+ individuals to see themselves reflected in media, art and the professional world. One young regular, Picard said, takes day trips from Culpeper, Va. to visit The Beautiful Idea, traveling with their father to spend hours in the store.

“There’s nothing like this in Culpeper,” said Picard. “There’s really nothing like this literally anywhere in Virginia.”

The owners of The Beautiful Idea make fostering this home for LGBTQ+ individuals a central tenet of their business model — their website frames the store as a “radical community hub.”  

A cluster of couches tucks into a sitting area behind the bookshelves, and the owners plan to use this space for movie nights, affinity group meetings, potlucks and other events as The Beautiful Idea community grows. One group of teenage customers spent so much time piling onto one of the couches that West had to reinforce its frame with metal.

“It was part of the plan for this to be a place where people would hang out and feel like a home,” Means said, “But it succeeded so quickly, and so much more than I expected. We get a lot of people who just come here as a second home.”

The Beautiful Idea is open to customers Tuesday through Sunday. Those interested can check out the bookstore on the Downtown Mall to find a warm and welcoming home for LGBTQ+ literature, art, community and joy.

When I began college at a small liberal arts college, I chose to double-major: I studied biology because I liked it (and thought it would get me a job) and English because I loved it (and thought it wouldn’t). It turns out that I was wrong on both counts. I tried to lean into the thing I was supposed to do: after graduating, I worked in pharmaceuticals and then in material sciences. But my heart wasn’t in it, and after a few years I decided to go to graduate school to study literature. My middle-class parents were dismayed that I would give up job security and a healthy income for novels or … baseball and monster trucks (my father actually asked if these were the topics I would research when I told him of my interest in American Studies). I assuaged their worry by telling them that if after a couple years it didn’t make sense to me, I could come back to the sciences. But I never looked back. It was amazing, the motivation and sheer joy I felt getting to spend time with the things I loved instead of trying to fake it.

I followed my bliss out of the lab and into the library. My own path has convinced me that we do a serious disservice when we deny or discourage students from finding and following their bliss. But I think English departments increasingly—albeit obliquely and perhaps unintentionally—are doing just that. In the wake of high-profile elegies for the English major and the attacks on the departments of literature and world languages at West Virginia University (most forcefully argued against in an open letter by Rose Casey, Jessica Wilkerson and Johanna Winant), having an answer to the question of “why literature?” has come to feel newly urgent. There are many answers already out there, but the most common one I hear on the job, the answer that departments offer most often in their efforts to get “butts in seats” and recruit or convert students to the major, is about the English major being effective training for a successful career. A quick tour of English department websites across the U.S. shows consistent messaging about a “plethora of marketable skills highly prized by employers” and the “diverse range of professional fields” for which English majors are uniquely suited. The major is touted as the perfect choice for students who “intend to work in technology, marketing, or sales or are interested in journalism, science writing, publishing, editing, or teaching.”

It’s not that I disagree with these claims; on the contrary, I do think that English majors are curious and creative—they think well, write well, communicate well—and are thus well-suited for a whole range of interesting careers. But something has always bothered me about this line of argument, which has always struck me as a bit of marketing more for corporate overlords and for parents of students than for the students themselves who are considering an English major. That it prepares students for professional success may well be true, but this fact sits uneasily alongside my own motivations for studying and teaching literature.

Stating those motivations plainly feels embarrassing. But here goes: I study and teach literature because I love it. We’re not really supposed to admit that—it’s too naïve, too indulgent, too elitist, or it’s not practical, not cool, not real-world enough. We tell our students who still dare to apply to graduate school in English not to say that they want to get an M.A. or a Ph.D. because they love reading; we roll our eyes at the application essays that open with an admission of “having always loved reading.” We minimize, or even disparage a love of books, even if that’s the honest reason most of us got into this profession. But what if downplaying our love—sweeping it under the rug of innovation, professionalization, optimization—is doing our field and our students a disservice? What if the love of literature and the pleasure of reading are the very things we should be selling?

My impression is that when teaching literature, academics teach methods of interpretation, critical thinking, historical context and various other things while always leaving room for love. We want our students to love reading and give them the tools we think will best help them develop that appreciation. But when it comes to our criticism, and what we say about the English major in print, we shy away from such naked affirmation. Love just isn’t cool—it’s warm and fuzzy and risks seeming like a “guilty pleasure,” what Arielle Zibrak has explained is something that we see as unproductive, and usually feminine. Although Roland Barthes’ classic The Pleasure of the Text and, more recently, Rita Felski’s work on attachment, argue that we should attend to the love readers feel for texts, for the most part we confine love to the classroom.

When did we stop believing that we should tell young people to study what invigorates and inspires them? There are several answers to this question: historical answers rooted in market crashes and vampiric student loan practices; cultural answers that point toward STEM-heavy notions of success and prestige; societal answers that relate to a general devaluation of the humanities. But they all converge around the notion that certain majors lead to certain jobs and so we scramble to prove that an English major does well on this front. Even if I agree—and I do, not least because my communication and writing skills helped me get those STEM jobs—there’s something rotten at the core of this logic. My sense is that the number of people whose undergraduate major directly informs what they do is in fact very small; it’s hard to draw a straight line from an undergraduate transcript to the work that someone in human relations or marketing or even law or medicine performs on a daily basis.

But even more important is the fact that I don’t think this messaging really works on the students it’s intended to convince. Although students (and more to the point, their parents) may want some assurance on the kinds of returns they can expect from the astronomical investment that is a college education today, they are smart enough to recognize all this hand-waving about job prospects for what it is: marketing meant to create majors, meet metrics, appease administrators. It’s a tactic that serves departments more than students, and our undergraduates—especially ones drawn to the humanities—see right through it. And when you talk to students who choose to study literature, almost all of them will tell you that they made that decision out of love. I think if we foreground and grow that love, we would do a better and more honest job selling the English major.

“Study something you love” is a surprisingly radical invitation in the neoliberal university. In its more cynical formulation, it might be followed up by the admission “… because there’s no guarantee of any job in today’s market.” But there are many more positive sides to a love of literature. First of all, and in direct contrast to all the language of jobs and salaries, reading is a private pleasure, one that resists the capitalistic logics of useability and deliverables. Christopher Newfield has argued that “a non-neoliberal self [is] clearly registered and highly articulated in literature,” but I’d go further to say that a “non-neoliberal self” is cultivated and given breathing room in the very process of reading. It is important that higher education is a place where students not only engage with subjects they think they should, but that they feel free to explore things they want to. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado rightfully argues that the ability to pursue such pleasures should be open to all students, not only privileged ones: “Universities, particularly public institutions, make the humanities and the arts accessible to first-generation and working-class students, as well as to students of minoritized identity backgrounds. In doing so, they embody a utopian ideal: the right of these students to have an intellectual life, and to enrich themselves through creative endeavors.”

But why literature? My short answer is that reading for pleasure, paradoxically, is also hard work. Reading cannot really be done passively: it requires imagination and engagement. Readers must summon the images and worlds described on the page. But most all, reading requires time. In a wonderful essay about “the power of patience,” art historian Jennifer L. Roberts explains that she focuses “on creating opportunities for students to engage in deceleration, patience, and immersive attention.” Reading fiction demands this patience and rewards immersive attention. To read a novel, whether long or short, requires a commitment of time far greater than the familiar scroll-click-swipe internet ecologies where students spend much of their time. Anyone who has ever been delighted by the way a novel’s ending brings different threads together, shocked by a plot twist, or let out a sigh of satisfaction as they reach a book’s last page or a poem’s final line knows this to be true. For me, this isn’t only a matter of expanding attention spans, but of braiding together pleasure and effort. To love something that we work at, to work at something that we love: this is not only a slogan that can be co-opted by the workplace, but a deeply personal experience that I have found crucial to my own survival. Most growth and many rewards come only with time and hard work: learning that patience and effort can be pleasurable is a lesson worth sharing with our students. This kind of payoff, whether we call it patience, self-motivation or resilience, doesn’t translate easily into a bullet point for a resume. But in my experience, it does contribute to a rich inner life, and more skills at coping with the challenges of outer life.

This is what we might call the social value of joy in learning, and I’m convinced that if we don’t believe in it, and don’t tell our students that we believe in it, we cede power to the vocational model of the corporate university. Market pressures have done a great job extinguishing this value, but we’ve also contributed to its endangerment. In the realm of literary criticism and scholarship, love is seen as uncritical, unsophisticated. Condemnation, denigration and claim-staking: these are viewed as higher-order operations and the surer path to professional success. I happen to believe this is a white, masculinist approach to knowledge, but that’s a topic for another essay. For now I’ll just say that canon wars, theory wars, method wars, the death of majors: these things make headlines. While some battles are important, not least because they represent a very real conflict between white supremacist ideologies and those seeking to oust them, more often it feels as though critics are fighting over the scraps we’ve left to ourselves. These internal, individualized fights sap our energy and divert our attention from what we do so well in the classroom—instilling in students the social value of joy in learning.

There are real enemies threatening English departments that we need to fight: adjunctification, corporatization, predatory student loan practices, tuition inflation, and the decimation of whole departments. I just want to be sure that we are not confusing fighting out of love with fighting love itself.

Over the last decade to fifteen years, a growing number of individuals have entered the art market as collectors. This surge is not solely attributed to the rise in artistic output and the emergence of promising artists but is also driven by a heightened recognition of the value of incorporating contemporary art into home spaces.

Furthermore, there is a notable uptick in the acquisition of art for investment purposes, a trend possibly also influenced by recent auctions where works by Malta’s modern art pioneers are reemerging and commanding appealing prices.

“Malta is currently enjoying a vibrant artistic scene with several exhibitions of different genres of art opening every week, and a market that is giving buyers ample choice to invest. As a result, this is also pushing for more artists to consider their art as a full-time profession,” says art historian and curator Dr Charlene Vella.

Dr Vella explains that while an understanding of art remains subjective, most people already know what they like and that buying an art piece as an investment will be an important consideration to make if one is to live with a work of art.

“Having said that, more people are seeking advice when it comes to buying art since they also understand that it takes more than mere good taste to distinguish good quality art, even though good taste is something that can be cultivated,” she explains.

Malta is currently enjoying a vibrant artistic scene with several exhibitions of different genres of art opening every week

Dr Vella also explains that the education system has an important role to play in fostering more appreciation towards art.

“Despite efforts by museums and those working in the cultural industries to be more attractive to local audiences, most families do not visit local museums. And since few parents take their children to cultural activities, it is schools that need to make more of an effort by encouraging outings to cultural events that could spark interest in children who would otherwise have missed out on such opportunities.”

Dr Vella also refers to some of the challenges that artists still face when they want to exhibit and show their work and that with so many exhibition spaces and art galleries offering ample choice and competition, artists must put in more effort to stand out and be noticed.

“It takes more than just talent. Creativity is an important aspect, as well as dedication, the ability to market yourself, choosing a curator, and such. It is tempting today to skip the important steps of intense artistic training with freely available online tutorials. And a trained eye will notice these deficiencies in artistic output.”

Dr Vella also believes that notwithstanding the small local market, there is still ample space for art galleries.

“Several local galleries have stood the test of time, indicating that when there is a well-informed and cultivated person behind that gallery, such a venture can survive and flourish.”

“Corporate companies can also support the art market more tangibly and beyond sponsorships of exhibitions by investing in more art for their offices and boardrooms. In doing so, corporate companies can support young, promising fine arts students, some of whom would also be encouraged to further their studies in fine arts abroad. Commissioning art from artists as corporate gifts would also be another way to support them.”

“Ultimately, art is an artist’s legacy, but an art collection is also a way in which someone can build a personal legacy through which one would be remembered – a legacy that can then be left to be enjoyed by future generations,” concluded Dr Vella.

As the Conservatives clutch at political straws, the Labour party is readying itself for government. Some predict a general election as early as next spring. In Thangam Debbonaire – who started out as a professional cellist – there is the unusual prospect of a culture secretary who understands the arts from deep personal experience. Two months into her job shadowing the unimpressive incumbent, Lucy Frazer, she is in listening mode. The next step is to get herself a serious, ambitious plan for power.

As Labour culture secretary, she would almost certainly score easy points by just not being Tory. That means, to pick some random examples, by not being among the 12 Tories to hold the post in 13 years. By displaying less ignorance about the brief (Nadine Dorries’s startling misapprehension, when culture secretary, that Channel 4 is publicly funded, stands out amid a strong field). By not relentlessly starving, punishing and criticising the BBC, the UK’s largest cultural organisation. By not dragging the arts into a cynical, divisive culture war. By not being part of a government that unleashes something as self-harming as an exit from the European Union. By not engaging in a zero-sum game in which London is pitted against the rest of the country in the name of levelling up.

But Labour needs to set its sights much higher than avoiding the Tories’ egregious failings. It needs to cherish and grow the arts again. And it needs to do so with purpose, optimism and pride.

The scale of the challenge is vast. The Tory destruction began in 2010, as soon as the coalition came to power, with George Osborne’s austerity cuts. The then culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, removed an instant £19m from Arts Council England’s budget, while the overall budget of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was reduced by 24% between 2010 and 2014-15, pulling it down from £1.4bn to £1.1bn. These seem tiny figures because they are: utterly inconsequential when set against Osborne’s total cuts, irrelevant when compared with overall government finances. Still, they were enormous enough when applied to individual arts organisations.

Now, after 13 years, grant-in-aid and lottery funding for the arts in England have undergone a real-terms cut of £178m. But of course cuts to the arts have never been about the money. They have been ideological. The Tories wanted a smaller state, objected to market interventions, strongly favoured science and technology at the expense of the arts and humanities, and, particularly during the later years of culture-war obsessed Tory rule, made no secret of their loathing of what they saw as a centre-left dominance in institutions from universities to heritage organisations.

These basic deprivations have been vastly compounded over the same period. Local authority support has drained away from civic museums and local theatres as councils’ income has plummeted and costs for statutory obligations, such as social care, have soared. School budgets have been starved: the Tories have been content to deny children from poorer backgrounds the soul-enlarging delights they make sure to provide for their own offspring, such as learning musical instruments, extracurricular theatre and visits to museums. The appalling blow of Brexit hit everyone and everything from touring musicians to international art loans and film production.

It was then that Covid-19 brought the cultural sector near to collapse. Along with the hospitality industry, it was among the worst hit parts of the economy. Though the Tories did bring forward a package to prevent the immediate, widespread bankruptcy of cultural institutions, there has been no serious attempt to put the arts world back on a sustainable footing. Inflation and the cost of living crisis have been deeply damaging. Now, instead of the much-vaunted “headroom” in the economy being used to help fix basic public services, including the arts, Jeremy Hunt, in his autumn statement, has declined to lift departmental spending in favour of sprinkling pre-election sweeteners to the Tory base.

The cultural sector is now immeasurably weakened compared with the pre-2010 years. Experts in preserving a good shopfront, our museums, theatres, orchestras and galleries have done their best to conceal the rot from the casual visitor. But they are damaged; they are shabbier, smaller, more timid than they used to be. They are taking fewer risks – of the sort that led to brilliant but unpredictable long-running theatre hits such as War Horse or Matilda. The Covid years in particular mean that fewer children are being exposed to theatre or music or dance or art: those things that can spark a child’s imagination, show her something curious and strange, deepen her understanding and empathy, shift the course of her life.

For those who work in the arts, whether as employees or as freelance artists, the situation is precarious. In the NHS in recent years, the Tories have made the service almost impossible for healthcare workers to thrive in or even survive in. The same is true for the arts. Earlier this year, in the wake of an exodus of artistic directors from theatres, the boss of Battersea Arts Centre enumerated 33 reasons why working in the arts was so difficult at the moment – from weak boards to a combative social media environment. But in the end, much circled back to underinvestment. Shrinking arts organisations and the underpaid, fatigued people who work in them are struggling to create the long-term conditions for the things they went into their job to achieve: to enable the creation of great art. To make our towns and cities places worth living in. To allow people from all parts of society contact with art’s life-changing possibilities.

An incoming Labour government will be failing the country unless it steps up to the challenge of fixing this situation. It will not be difficult to do in one sense: comparatively small amounts of investment make vast differences. But it must be done in the full, confident sense that doing so is not an optional, frivolous add-on to the real job of governing. A healthy, fully functioning cultural infrastructure is a sign of a healthy, fully functioning society. The Arts Council, founded in 1946, should be spoken about in the same breath as the NHS, founded in 1948. Both belong to Labour’s postwar conviction that good things ought to be available to everyone, regardless of their income.

Investing in the arts also happens to be a sound economic investment, in which relatively small amounts have excellent returns, entirely in line with the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s ambition to pursue economic growth. It is a means of restoring local pride and reinvigorating town centres, of attracting tourists and delivering soft power.

But it means so much more than that. It is about giving people back public space – space in which they can exit their digital echo chambers and together confront unfamiliar, difficult ideas. It is about offering people ideas beyond their immediate experience – ideas that can bring delight, hope and joy, but also spark individuals’ ambitions, or suggest possibilities beyond their immediate horizon. It is about offering people the chance to live with dignity, to be better citizens who treat each other with decency and understanding. It is the stuff of being fully human. Debbonaire, Reeves and Keir Starmer need to think big. And they need to do it now.

• Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer