Culturalize tourism or touristify culture. The dilemma, posed in this way, was suggested a few days ago by the Andalusian journalist and writer Guillermo Busutil in an article on the cultural pulse of Malaga published by El Confidencial. “What predominates –Busutil stated– is the tourist offer, the touristification of culture, not the culturalization of tourism, which would be ideal”.
Malaga, an example of success for having known how to project itself through culture, also suffers the tolls of any city dependent on tourism. It is not only about gentrification or incivility: it is also about the temptation to prioritize culture-spectacle. So, what a welcome to the club of cities where tourist demand ends up shaping the offer, if little is neglected.
In Andalusia, the controversy over the dismissal of the prestigious writer and journalist Eva Díaz Pérez as director of the Andalusian Center for Letters, decided a few months after the Ministry of Culture and Historical Heritage was renamed the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, is recent. , after the last remodeling promoted by President Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla.
It is true that the contrast posed in the title of this article admits and requires nuances. No matter how pejorative the concept of touristifying culture may seem to us, it is worth suggesting that certain cultural institutions contemplate a programming quota that has the vocation of attracting –also– tourists who plan to visit the city. Alternating critical or risk proposals with other more popular ones is a way to bring more public to the former, but at the same time it can serve to achieve a more interesting urban tourism than the one that, say, travels where only cheap and cheap leisure is sold. uninhibited.
Somehow, a reasonable dose of touristification of the cultural offer to educate tourism is useful, without losing sight of what the essential challenges of culture should be: from training people with a critical spirit to promoting the mere pleasure of beauty. .
What is clear is that cities that have undergone accentuated de-industrialization processes and that depend more than others on the visitor economy are obliged to explore that fine line between culture and tourism. Barcelona, without going any further.
This debate can take place at the academic level, in the media or in decision-making processes. An example is that of the Barcelona Global association, which since its inception has had the wisdom to place culture at the epicenter of its city model. In this work, the role played by Mateu Hernández, who until recently was its CEO, with the support of successive presidents, has been key.
Hernández has known how to connect the most innovative cultural proposals with bourgeois Barcelona. This vocation of bringing culture to the center of the debate without trying to generate business with it from the outset is precisely one of the factors that have set Barcelona Global apart from other lobbies that have arisen in the strictly economic sphere.
One of the riskiest proposals of this association was to ask that part of the tourist tax be used to finance the promotion of the city as the capital of music. An idea that suggested a question that takes us back to the beginning: should the city use culture to be more attractive and, therefore, attract more investment and talented people and thus be able to better finance its social policies and offer more decent salaries? So your youngsters don't have to run away?
If we agree that the answer is affirmative, formulas will have to be found to do so without prostituting authenticity standards and a critical sense that have been in the DNA of Barcelonan culture for more than two thousand years. The same goes for Malaga and the rest of the cities with a long history. Culturalize tourism? Why not?
