The New York Times checked in on 75 artists to see how they've spent a year in lockdown
Now that an entire year has passed since most of us went into lockdown in response to the spread of COVID-19, there’s enough distance from the beginning of the pandemic to look back with some kind of remove and see how it’s affected the normal patterns of our lives. In an effort to allow readers “into the life of a creative mind in quarantine,” The New York Times posed seven questions to 75 different artists about how a year of wildly different living has shaped themselves and their work.
The list of responses is huge, but a few of the responses stick out. When asked what they’d created over the past year, The National’s Aaron Dessner mentions working with Taylor Swift; Aidy Bryant says she and her colleagues on Shrill produced an entire third season; and novelist Ali Smith simply replies, “A compost heap.” A question about what art they’ve found themselves enjoying this year sees Phoebe Bridgers talking about getting “very deep into” Gabriel García Márquez, and Trent Reznor saying he’s “stumbled into the world of YouTube tutorials for various bits of musical gear.”