DURING the long days and nights of lockdown, many have turned to phones, tablets and PCs to quench the  emotional and intellectual thirst of isolation by accessing cultural content.

Museums and galleries produced virtual exhibitions and tours and the proliferation of such initiatives arose from a recognition of the important role that art plays in sustaining us and the universal right to culture.

Despite the limitations of experiencing culture through digital interfaces, along with the individualised nature of online engagement, digital access to art can be enriching.

Access to performances, films and music is a lifeline to ideas and emotions that helped guard against the darkness of isolation and the expansion of free access to digital culture during the lockdown provided a glimpse of a future in which knowledge and art are shared freely and in common.

Throughout the first few months of the lockdown, most moves to extend access to online culture were billed as temporary emergency measures in response to the crisis and most have since ended as institutions have opened up again.

Emergency or not, copyright holders were not slow to act when they felt their intellectual property was being infringed. The Internet Archive’s free library of e-books was shut down after only a few weeks, on threat of a lawsuit from publishers.

As with changes to remote working, the digitisation of culture through streamed performance and online exhibitions is unlikely to disappear now that it has been established.

Though the crisis has accelerated the trend, digitising and opening up collections had started long before the virus struck and the question now is how expanded digital access can be integrated within a rehabilitated cultural sector.

Institutions were already under enormous pressure to increase revenue and access to digital culture is seen as another potential income stream, possibly using subscription or paywall models.

The success of Netflix — now worth more than Exxon — and other streaming platforms is held up as a model for emulation. But the commercial logic of algorithmically designed streaming services like Netflix and Spotify privilege certain forms of culture to the detriment of others.

Streaming is predicated on high consumption “binging” and repeated playbacks and therefore trades better in mood and affect than intellectually demanding culture.

At local, regional and national level, public funding can provide artists with opportunities to break from this logic, allowing more radical and challenging forms of culture to emerge.

Digital culture must not be beholden to the laws of the algorithm — the Netflixification of culture must be resisted.

It is clear that the current crisis will be taken by corporate interests as an opportunity to further entrench the neoliberal privatisation of the cultural sector.

The Southbank Centre recently announced plans to make 400 of its 577 staff redundant and, when it reopens in 2021, to model itself on a start-up enterprise, with 90 per cent of its spaces for rent and only 10 per cent devoted to art.

These moves must be resisted. But there is the opportunity to go further, to strengthen and extend public funding and democratise access to, and participation in, the arts.

The pandemic has reinforced arguments for a publicly funded cultural sector — the model of private arts funding dominant in the US, in which institutions rely on philanthropy and earned income rather than government funding, has left cultural institutions especially exposed to the economic fallout.

The American Alliance of Museums reported to Congress in March that as many as a third of museums could fail to reopen their doors, compared with one in 10 globally.

Rather than finding new ways of monetising digital culture, our recent collective experience of free online art can lead to fundamental questions about access and ownership.

Copyright is usually framed in terms of the individual artist or author yet, in practice, copyright is typically ceded to publishers or studios who exercise these powers and get most of the benefits, sharing only a small portion with the creator.

It is usually publishers that lobby to increase copyright powers. Yet corporations spin and hide behind the image of the penurious artist to defend their extraordinary profit ratios.

It is not illegal file-sharing that has made the cultural sector so precarious but a system in which a company like Spotify can get away with paying artists as little as $0.0032 per play.

The paradigm of free digital culture can challenge and expose the lie of neoliberalism. The internet has opened up new possibilities for cultural exchange, both in terms of sharing existing content and finding platforms for one’s own work that are not mediated by institutions or corporations.

The persistent popularity of file-sharing networks demonstrates a social desire to share and exchange culture — as Hollywood film-maker Shekhar Kapur quipped: “In India we see copyright as the right to copy.”

Cultural producers, organising as part of the labour movement, can ensure that the post-pandemic cultural landscape is one in which artists earn a decent and secure living.

In France, the system of financial support for artists and technicians, known as “intermittents du spectacle,” has just been extended into 2021, despite years of government attempts to end it.

The artists’ unemployment insurance system is paid for by employers’ and workers’ contributions, with an artist or technician working a set number of hours during high season to gain benefits for the fallow periods between contracts. With models such as this, artists’ unions can tip the balance of power back towards cultural producers.

Free access to digital culture need not threaten artists — digital culture is not a replacement for the physical experience of art but complements and enhances it. Rather than build walls around online culture and knowledge, we must expand free access.

Let the scars of the pandemic spur us to build a society in which culture and knowledge are freely shared in common.

Adam Stoneman works in museum education. This article is part of the series on Covid-19 and culture jointly published by the Morning Star and Culture Matters. A longer version of this article is at culturematters.org.uk.