Katy Tooth

'Credit-Crunch' - the dreaded double barrelled 'c' word is everywhere. Affecting us all, it dominates the headlines, has become a talking point (almost rivalling the weather), a marketing strategy and a universal scapegoat for everything that is wrong with the world today. Its affect on the art world has been rigorously documented, provoking a feeding frenzy of smug journalistic comment. While some, like Januszczak (The Times), hail the recession as the best thing that has happened to the art world in decades, providing a well needed cull to Britain's overlarge herd of artists and flourishing crop of bad art, others are lamenting the predicted closure of galleries and proclaiming apocalyptic doom and the death of all art and culture.

The most recent treatment of this issue is the BBC's Imagine Documentary, which saw Alan Yentob travel through the US and the UK surveying the affect of an economic downturn on the arts, both today and during the Great Depression. While Yentob cleverly refuses to provide any definitive answers to the customary stream of rhetorical questions ("Can Culture pull the nation together in a time of need?": "Does art flourish in an age of uncertainty or is it just tougher?"), as expected of the BBC, the programme is well researched and thought-provoking. Recognising that historically art flourishes in a time of depression, the two-part documentary looks at the surge of post-depression artwork as an indication of what we can hope for today.

Although the art market may have crashed along with the bankers' bonuses, and despite the myriad of articles bemoaning hardships and gallery closures, Imagine provides hope in that great art is often the product of catastrophe. The government is investing £40m in the arts as part of its Sustain initiative, supporting new proposals and ensuring that existing projects have the financial backing to survive.

The closure of exhibition venues may also simply be resolved by a change of medium, resulting in a greater use of the Internet to showcase work. This idea has been recently exploited in gallery podcasts and the National Gallery IPhone application, enabling hundreds of artworks and corresponding video footage and commentary to be viewed from the comfort of an armchair and shiny mac screen.

We have only to look around to see that art is definitely not dying. Gormley's fourth plinth 'One and Other' will see 2400 members of the public create a living portrait of the UK and there are thousands of arts events across the country providing platforms and opportunity for art in recession.

In New York, Recession Art has been launched with the exhibition 'No Money, No Problems', encouraging submissions from the young and unemployed as well as established artists. Devoted to helping emerging artists show and sell their work, Recession Art gives middle-income art lovers and collectors an opportunity to buy original work at reasonable prices.

History relates that the arts flourish in troubled times - Yentob's documentary gives us hope that art may prove to be the silver lining of this economic storm cloud.