Biel, yes, and not honey on the lips of the various Catalan cultural sectors. Because if the non-approval of the 2024 budget has hit education, health, housing plans or the fight against drought, etc., in that poor sister of the budgets that had always been the Department of Culture of the Generalitat, it has course a strong disappointment after the initial hope, almost certainty, of improvement, which perfected the budget increase of recent years.
Councilor Natàlia Garriga, in her first appearance at the parliamentary headquarters, committed to reaching 2% of the budget for culture when the end of the legislature was reached. And the truth is that their efforts have been irreproachable... But the legislature has ended before its time and there are already so many early electoral calls that we can now add 2024 to the decade – more than a decade in reality – lost.
At the beginning of this month of March, again in Parliament, the minister presented a culture budget that totaled 566 million euros, 1.7% of the global budget that ultimately turned out to be unborn. 264 million more than in the 2021 budget, so that you can get an idea of the leap in scale.
They improved almost all the items: linguistic policy, of course, but they received more money - which now it is feared that they will not see - all the great cultural facilities, the Catalunya Media City was launched (what a mania with calling things in English and make us look international!) in the industrial complex of the three Besòs chimneys and the restoration of the Foneria building was planned, at the end of the Rambla and very close to the headquarters of the department, as a future national center for digital arts, an intervention in that last stretch of the Rambla that should also count on the Barcelona City Council to redefine that part of the city and its cultural and civic uses.
The Diada de Sant Jordi or the very recent success of the world of performing arts with its Cap Butaca Buida campaign can make us believe that ours is a cultured people willing to participate more in culture, without entering into distinctions between high and low culture. But the reality of the figures is stubborn, and there is still a third, more or less, of Catalans who practically do not buy books (or do not do so for pleasure), never go to the theater or a concert and do not visit museums or art galleries either. , although they may frequent some libraries, especially when before the platforms, movies were lent to be watched from the couch at home.
In short, I do not intend to be or appear to be a cynic, because I already tell you that the management and will of the councilor have been commendable, but we still have a problem with access to culture for a good part of the population. What we do know is that, if there are books in a house, it is very likely that the children who grow up in it will end up being readers, in a similar way to the fact that, if there are musical instruments in that house, it is also likely that music will be part of the house. of the development of these minors.
It is not easy to establish the cultural map of the country and cross-reference the data with those two inevitable vectors: income level and parental education level. Well, that is precisely where we risk the future of an egalitarian society that guarantees access to culture for all. The right to culture, some prefer to say, although I insist that the crux of the issue is not only the equipment and its dissemination among citizens, but the structuring of education and culture as a whole that must be considered looking towards the generations to come, with its evident presence of immigrants from very diverse origins and which requires an effort to ensure that culture is also critical thinking and the assumption of active citizenship. Without cultural development there is no democratic growth. And knowing how to read is not enough to be literate, nor is the right to vote enough to be able to exercise it conscientiously.
Anyway, I am listing a string of vague things, I know, but the fact is that, despite many partial studies and despite that feeling of self-complacency where we usually say that Catalonia is a land of culture and that it is full of associations, athenaeums, choirs, groups theaters, libraries, exhibition halls, music concerts of all kinds, bookstores and even book cities, like Calonge (another more than laudable initiative), the unpleasant truth appears, and the country, an undoubted tourist mecca, does not quite respond to his reputation as a great cultural consumer. And of course the decline – or the lack of attention to culture – goes by neighborhood. And that we should be much more attentive to those borders that are not so clear to us and that present obvious dangers for the immediate future. Having said all that, what a shame about the budget!
