Artists, pandemic apathy and the "time of monsters".
In the face of rising fascism and growing anti-science sentiment, it is essential for artists to acknowledge and challenge a pandemic-shaped cultural vacuum.
Note: This is an extended version of a piece first published in Healthy Debate on April 6 2025.
On February 16th 2025, a group of “long haulers”1 were seen protesting outside the Royal Albert Hall in London, where the BAFTA ceremony was about to take place. The activists wanted to raise awareness about the silence surrounding Long Covid in the Arts and the pandemic’s lasting impact on the entertainment industry. These disabled performers from the collective Protect the Heart of the Arts tried to disrupt the exclusive awards ceremony with signs and a die-in protest. “There is a Long Covid crisis in the Arts,” their t-shirts read.
As a writer who lived with Long Covid for two years, I support both the statement and the initiative. Today more than ever, I think it is essential for artists to acknowledge and challenge a pandemic-shaped cultural vacuum.
Addressing the traumatic memory of the COVID-19 pandemic
I understand the memory of the pandemic is painful, and personal. For some, like me, it is one of loss and suffering. For the most privileged, the pandemic will be forever associated with the first—and probably last—time they ever had to endure such drastic suspension of their individual liberties. The rich and powerful are not used to being banned from crossing borders or having to deal with curfews.
But for all of us, the “COVID times” hold a memory of prolonged restrictions and coercive public messaging, that hindered our ability to do life as we knew it. The pandemic’s legacy is defined by a sense of immobilizing uncertainty, and by an unresolved grief of worldwide proportions. In the last 5 years, COVID-19 has killed more than 7 million people around the world. For weeks, dead bodies were piling up in refrigerated trucks parked in front of the hospitals of some of the most famous cities in the world.
The COVID-shaped collective grief is immense, and that is not even accounting for the elephant in the room, the ‘long tail’ of COVID-19 : Long Covid (estimated to durably impact 1 in 10 people); the silent, whole-body organic and immune damage that even the mildest cases can cause; the delay in care suffered by patients who weren’t able to access life-saving medical attention for other conditions due to the exceptional burden that COVID-19 represented... These numbers add up, even if we stopped counting. Or, maybe, precisely because we stopped counting. Swiss insurance company Swiss Re Group published a report last year stating that COVID-19 “may lead to the longest period of peacetime excess mortality”. Let that sink in.
Yet, where are the memorials? The commemorative days?
The monuments in honor of the frontline workers, scientists, caretakers, who looked death in the eye to make the world go round while the rest of us sheltered in place?
Nowhere to be seen are the memories of our shared trauma.
The more time passes between what people identify as “the end of the pandemic”—in itself is a very questionable concept—and the present day, the more its memory becomes fragmented, randomized and divisive, leaving the door wide open to revisionism.
The death of public health and the time of monsters
Sometime around 2022, the powerful of this world decided to go full-on “let it rip” in order to keep the economy afloat.
In a shocking interview to BBC in August 2023, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that “even though the vulnerable will fall by the wayside”, COVID-19 was no longer a threat to the general population. This drastic shift in the ethics of the pandemic was an unacceptable, eugenicist capitulation as well as a moral defeat, but it nonetheless spread rapidly from the top-down. Early in the pandemic, the same statement coming from a careless anti-masker would have been met with outrage by a majority of well-meaning people. Today, it is a widely accepted stance.
Then, somewhere between then and now, antivax and anti-science theories have become mainstream. RFK Jr., a known anti-vaxxer with no interest in scientific truth, is now the Health Secretary of the United States of America. On his first day as President, Donald Trump signed an executive order removing the USA from the World Health Organization. The following day, the CDC2, the FDA3 and the NIH4 were forced into silence. Tens of thousands of their federal agents have since been purged. Websites listing precious public health information have been censored or gone dark. Scientists and researchers have seen their grants frozen. Outbreaks of tuberculosis, and measles, the latter previously considered eliminated in the US, are surging.
We are witnessing a high-speed collapse of public health in North America.
It is my firm opinion that the minimizing of the COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent abandonment of vulnerable and disabled people, was a breeding ground for the normalization of anti-democratic, eugenicist ideas. The same ones that gave us three Nazi salutes broadcasted live on American TV in the span of one month.
The time of monsters5, well and truly upon us.
This sudden shift in morals that the “end” of the COVID-19 pandemic brought on made us collectively unable to grieve the last few years, and forced us into a state of denial and constant dissociation. In that regard, I am convinced artists and creators share some of the responsibility.
I think we artists—writers, painters, musicians, movie directors, actors—have a “duty of care” when it comes to representing the unprecedented times we live through. If the Arts are a reflection of the zeitgeist of their time, it is obvious from the lack of representation of the COVID-19 pandemic that we are experiencing a a collective amnesia.
For some reason, the pandemic—and matters of illness and disability in general—do not get the attention they deserve as major subjects of creation. As a result, ableism is too often in the blind spot of collective consciousness and intersectional struggles.
The scarce but era-defining representations of the pandemic
Most cultural representations of the pandemic happened in its first two years. Early pandemic art was a testimony to the incredibly fertile ground that these unprecedented times brought forth. Some of the most irreverent, inspired, genre-defining works of the last decade were produced in these first few years.
Bo Burnham’s musical Inside, written in lockdown, is a brilliant example. In the show, the comedian mixes music, theatre and stand-up comedy to document his life and deteriorating mental health in isolation. It is an astonishing and heartfelt mix of comedy and drama, and a powerfully meta statement on many struggles of our times—suicidal ideation, relationships, worker exploitation, toxic masculinity or societal collapse.
Glass Onion : A Knives Out Mystery, a movie by Rian Johnson that released in 2022, also addresses the pandemic early on. As we are introduced to the main cast of characters, we get to see how each of them is dealing with the COVID lockdown mandates. This is as clever an introduction to a character’s psychology as they come. And a deliciously gritty criticism of how entitled, privileged people can think they live above the laws. The sense of entitlement of the rich and powerful is a major theme in the movie, whose villain is not-so-slightly inspired from real-life fascist billionaire Elon Musk. In a hilarious scene at the start of Glass Onion, our Musk impersonator forcibly inoculates his guests with an oral vaccine against COVID-19 before ferrying them to his private island. This fictional scene is nonetheless a witty depiction of how the most privileged among us can afford to underestimate a deadly and disabling virus. They have access to tools and resources that the rest of us do not.
Less famous, but probably one of the works of fiction that most boldly addresses the pandemic is the second season of HBO’s original series Betty. Director Crystal Moselle’s choice to depict the pandemic-era NYC and its consequences on her characters’ lives is nothing short of sensational. The pandemic is not just glanced over in passing but woven into the script, and intertwined with issues of gender, race and age to make a solid point about how the pandemic sits at the center of multiple intersectional questions. Disappointment Media calls the show “an exceptional piece of COVID-19 media”. I can only agree.
Other TV shows released between 2020 and 2022 also featured the pandemic, like Law and Order’s SVU, Greys’ Anatomy, or The Morning Show.
However, quickly after the last restrictions were lifted following the misguided assumption thatCOVID was “over”, that it was time to go “back to normal”, representations of the pandemic in the arts and media stopped almost entirely.
I am, among other things, a video game writer and narrative designer. When I was working on my third game, Lost Records : Bloom & Rage, I made a case to my team about including the pandemic in our story. Originally, the present tense section of this game, that spans over two different periods in time, was supposed to take place in 2019. “It will be easier that way,” the director would say as we were writing the story. “We can’t know how things will evolve, COVID-wise.” But pretending like the pandemic never happened sounded to me like the antithesis of my work as a fiction writer. “When this game releases 4 years from now, the world will be a very different place than what it was in 2019,” I argued, “and if we don’t acknowledge the pandemic years, we will risk sounding tone-deaf, out-of-place”. Eventually, the team agreed with me.
Seeing as the game was just released, it is still too early to know what the reception to the pandemic being mentioned will be. So far, reviews that allude to it are very positive. Checkpointgaming.net writes that “the references to the pandemic and related slang firmly plant this as a dual-period piece that will likely age well because of this specificity”, while Horror Press goes into more detail : “This probably isn’t the first game to reference the COVID pandemic but I appreciate how they handled the topic. It’s not over-the-top or preachy but it exists within Bloom & Rage’s world as it exists in ours. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Yes, there are a handful of early representations of the COVID-19 pandemic in our mainstream cultural landscape.
But, as the world moved on to resume consuming and behaving as if nothing had happened, creators no longer felt obligated to keep the pandemic and its aftermath in their art.
Yet the world today is not the same one we departed when COVID-19 first hit. In fact, it looks nothing like it. It feels darker today. Sicker, somehow.
I’m not saying this was exclusively caused by the pandemic, but I am convinced that the unwillingness to collectively acknowledge its impact at a societal level eased us all into a state of apathy that increased our tolerance to the unacceptable.
A brave new world
The Arts have not been spared from their share of losses to COVID-19. Acclaimed musician Manu Dibango, Broadway star Nick Cordero, country legend Charley Pride, and famous author Julie Powell all passed away from the virus. The list is long, so I’ll stop there.
David Lynch was pretty open about how the threat of COVID was stopping him from directing again, seeing as he was at risk of severe complication from the virus—he lived with COPD, a chronic lung disease. Yet, how many people who mourned his recent passing would be ready to acknowledge that they are part of the problem that prevented this legendary director from making any new art? That we now live in a world that finds it acceptable to exclude the more vulnerable for the sake of going “back to normal”?
Similarly, many artists have started opening up about their struggle with Long Covid, despite the risk to their careers. Acclaimed writer Madeline Miller (Circe, The Song of Achilles), American guitarist Dave Navarro, former member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or actors Tilda Swinton, Colin Farrell, Matt McGorry, Alyssa Milano, Salma Hayek, just to name a few. Even an artist as young as Billie Eilish shared that she needed months to recover after an infection in 2022: “It was bad. (...) I wasn't gonna die, but that does not take away from how miserable it was. It was terrible. I still have side effects.”
Neither is it uncommon now to have world-renowned bands and musicians halt world tours or cancel shows due to illness. These last two years only, Madonna, Mariah Carrey, Ringo Starr, Justin Timberlake, Childish Gambino, Neil Young, Blink-182 and Paramore, amongst others, have all had to cancel tours or shows due to infections.
Despite the general silence on the matter, this “back to normal” world feels anything but.
Missing representations put us at risk of forgetting important lessons
Nowadays, any mention of “the COVID times” is often faced with a strong temptation to dissociate. Yet we’re not talking about the pandemic nearly as much as we should. This lack of self-reflection is bound to come back and bite us, as the climate collapse brings with it the dawn of the Pandemicene.
It is not the first time that a pandemic’s memory has met a similar fate of collective amnesia. Some historians refer to the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918-1920—commonly known as Spanish flu—as the “forgotten pandemic”6.
It is true that the 1918 pandemic was overshadowed by another traumatic event of global magnitude: the end of World War I. Still, it seems unbelievable that a pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million of people around the world, a death toll far superior to that of the Great War, did not generate much interest from the historians and artists of the time.
This is especially baffling when we consider how many major artistic figures of the time were directly affected by the illness. Guillaume Apollinaire, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, John Singer Sargent, or Virginia Woolf, to name a few.
Woolf’s essay On Being Ill, published in 1926, was a powerful attempt at centering the theme of illness and disability as a major literary subject, on the same level as war or love. Considering the COVID-shaped cultural vacuum, I would say this essay is more relevant today than ever.
When COVID first hit, the world rediscovered the forgotten lessons of the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918, only to immediately forget them again.
Take the undisputed science of clean air, for example. Built in 1927, in the aftermath of the Great Influenza, the Orpheum Theater in Vancouver was considered “pandemic-proof” thanks to its cutting-edge ventilation system—still functional to this day.
Sadly, the science of clean air was disregarded and even scorned all throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. If I were to guess, I would say that the huge cost necessary to upgrade modern public spaces’ ventilation greatly contributed to this. Yes, your children’s health would be greatly improved if their school or daycare had adequate ventilation systems mitigating the spread of airborne diseases. No, the public and private sectors don’t want you to know that, or you might start requiring that they upgrade their standards to ensure your family’s safety.
Collective amnesia and missing cultural representations of past pandemics, specifically the Great Influenza, might have played a part in the omission of precious scientific knowledge.
Art as pandemic preparedness
What lessons, if any, did you take away from the COVID-19 pandemic?
How does your art, or the art and media you consume, reflect these lessons learned?
It is a truth as old as time that art is a uniquely durable way for humans to pass down important knowledge and testimonies to the next generations. Folklore and cautionary tales, for example, are used in societies around the world to address social issues and taboos, or warn their members of a threat to the community.
My opinion is that, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the capitalist urge to go “back to normal” has deprived us of the cultural representations and discourse necessary to process our collective grief. It has also made us wildly unprepared to face the next pandemics. With the threat of an avian flu pandemic looming, this is a pretty grim realization.
Reminding each other of the “COVID times” can bring up a lot of discomfort, and sometimes trigger surprisingly extreme reactions. I know a thing or two about this, as someone who still masks in public indoor spaces in 2025. I am a walking visual reminder of something deep and dark, buried low under the surface of our collective amnesia.
But the lacking or missing representations of the pandemic in the arts, popular culture and media are fragmenting our shared reality. The cultural vacuum surrounding this experience of collective grief creates a context ideal for monsters to thrive in oblivion.
In a post-truth era where fake news, conspiracy, revisionism and AI-generated content are flooding the stream of our human consciousness, it is essential that artists take on the responsibility to conjure up collective memory, however traumatic, if only for the sake of catharsis and posterity.
1 Colloquial term used to designate people living with Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), a post-viral condition subsequent to a COVID-19 infection. Long Covid can present as a variety of long-lasting and debilitating symptoms affecting respiratory, cardiovascular, neurological, reproductive or digestive systems, among others. Scientists estimate that 1 in 5 infection leads to Long Covid, and that 1 in 9 Canadian adults have been affected by long-term symptoms after a COVID-19 infection. The duration of Long Covid symptoms car vary from 3 months to years. Currently, there is no known cure to this condition. Vaccination reduces but does not prevent entirely the risk of Long Covid.
2 Center for Disease Control, national US public health agency monitoring and investigating outbreaks of infectious diseases, occupational safety and environmental health, among other missions.
3 Food and Drugs Administration, a federal agency that promotes public health and supervises food and drug safety. Among other missions, it publishes recalls of products unsafe for human and animal consumption.
4 National Institutes of Health, the primary US agency for biomedical and public health research, largest single funder of biomedical research in the world.
5 From the famous quote by Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci : ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born : now is the time of monsters.’
6 Historian Alfred Crosby’s book America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1989) was originally published in 1976, but it was reissued under this new title in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.