Minutes of reading | Shoemaker to your shoes

Public cultural management, in addition to attending to its substantive work for the creative promotion and development of artistic-cultural expressions, must focus on three dimensions of incidence: social, economic and recreational. The social dimension as a mechanism for attention to cultural rights, its triggering work for community development, crime prevention and reconstruction of the social fabric. The economic dimension as a generating line of employment, welfare and sectoral activation of a community that is sustained by it. And a recreational dimension, although some tear their clothes, so that culture approaches and attends to a necessary situation for the mental, individual and collective health of citizens.

These three dimensions generally do not have visibility from the institutions. Few and honorable exceptions contemplate this comprehensiveness. Those who govern seem to have a diffuse concept of what cultural instances should be and do. In political and campaign discourse, the common place is predictable: “art and culture help us transform society”, “promote culture so that our girls and boys have recreation and development options”, “art and culture as food for the spirit“, among others. However, reality prevails: budget cuts, haggling over resources to institutions, the constant absence of the cultural agenda in the government agenda and the interference of officials, civil servants or advisers outside the development of cultural policy are normalized. so that, with their bureaucratic genius and ignoring the most basic things, they want to look good with the authority by proposing “brilliant ideas” on the table such as bringing music, batucada, face painting —without underestimating these honorable tasks— “or something that attracts a lot of people” to government events or festivals. Those of us who have participated in it, know this painful suffering.

Hopefully the comprehensive vision of what should be in public cultural management permeates those who govern and know that there are professionals in the field who fight from their trenches to dignify and pay their profession; that they also distinguish that there are doomsayers and opportunistic dealers who camouflage themselves to sell mirrors and who harm the cultural community. An agenda of events in which the request for free or economic underestimation of the artistic community is constant, is not and should not be confused with a cultural public policy. These elements do not pay for a society whose reality is clear: rulers are needed who understand that the cultural community is not a minor sector, neither of speech nor of decoration, but of facts. Shoemaker to your shoes.

Let’s defend our institutions

The attack against the institutions is unfortunate. The grievances are not only the words that have been irresponsibly repeated on a daily basis; grievances are the facts that by action or omission are ending things that, even being perfectible, worked. Douglas North, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 for his studies on institutions linked to economic development, said that the main role of an institution is to reduce uncertainty. And yes, in times where institutions are to be changed and destroyed, it would seem that the only thing they want to do is increase uncertainty. At the end of the day, evil minds favor troubled rivers.

See ya!