Conceptualising Cultural Policy in Cuba

"Culture brings freedom.

– José Martí y Pérez.

Whether conducted at a local, national or regional level, any study of cultural policy must take account of two basic factors. In the first place, the precise relationship between culture and the state must be considered, with an emphasis on the role that cultural producers are expected to play within society. At the same time, the socio-economic framework that has been created to support culture needs to be assessed, particularly whether cultural production and dissemination is provided for wholly or partially by the state and, if partially, which other mechanisms are expected to be relied upon by artists and cultural institutions. These factors are interdependent inasmuch as a proportional relationship tends to exist between the perceived social role of culture and the extent to which it is supported by the state. In turn, these determinants influence discussions that are central to the cultural field, such as those around the relationships between aesthetics and ideology, form and content, autonomy and engagement.

Cultural Policy under Capitalism

If we broadly consider the cultural policy of Western Europe and the US in relation to the first of the two main factors outlined above – the relationship between culture, state and society – we find that the emergence of a private market for art during the eighteenth century ultimately led to the exemption of artists from playing a social role. As the economy of art moved away from the whims of individual patrons towards a system in which artworks were made in advance of finding buyers, 'the artistic genius isolated himself or herself from the masses and from the market; and art isolated itself in this first phase from society'. But rather than representing a total separation, the newly autonomous art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries maintained the prerogative to 'reflect critically upon society'. In the years leading up to the French Revolution of 1848, creative intellectuals formed alliances across political, social and economic divides, to participate in concerted action which reached its denouement in the Paris Commune of 1871. Sixteen years earlier, one of the artists involved in the Commune, Gustave Courbet, had published a Realist Manifesto as the catalogue for a self-organised exhibition.

At the start of the nineteenth century, G.W.F. Hegel had afforded art a significant role in his philosophy of spirit, within the subcategory of absolute spirit (alongside, but subordinate to, religion and philosophy). For him, art – conceived as literature, poetry and, to some extent, painting and sculpture but not music – could portray the human spirit in sensual form (considered inferior to the pictorial depiction of religion and the conceptual thought of philosophy). As the human spirit was considered the highest manifestation of the absolute, Hegel argued, art not only revealed God but also colluded in His self-actualisation, rendering art a phase of the Absolute Idea. The epitome of this way of working was to be found in Greek art, which perfectly reconciled form and content in a way that the Romantics had not been able to repeat under Christianity. Grounded in Hegelian idealism, Courbet'sRealist Manifesto rejected the subjectivism of the Romantic era to embrace a new artistic objectivity that reconciled form and content.

In Hegel's schema, absolute spirit was categorically distinct from subjective spirit (corresponding to individual psychology) and objective spirit (composed of 'morality, social and economic institutions, the state and political history'). This meant that the sensual medium, art, was doomed to remain segregated from matters of politics and the state. It is hardly surprising, then, that, after the rout of the Commune, the attempt to reconcile art and politics was superseded by an evacuation of political content from art. This gave rise to an 'art for art's sake' that Walter Benjamin would later bemoan as the cult of 'negative theology in the form of the idea of "pure" art, which [...] denied any social function'. In chapter three, we shall consider the ways in which discussions around Marxian aesthetics have historically tended to prioritise realism over abstraction and to deem formal experimentation escapist. As will be seen, attempts to prescribe and proscribe particular aesthetic tropes were strongly resisted by creative practitioners in revolutionary Cuba, stimulating a lively debate around both realism and idealism.

Significantly, the eighteenth-century shift to a market economy for art coincided with the inception of aesthetic theory, which saw Immanuel Kant positing aesthetics as a realm of enquiry distinct from both practical reason (moral judgement) and understanding (scientific knowledge), to form a necessary, if problematic, bridge between the two. Terry Eagleton has convincingly argued that the imposition of theory onto a potentially liberating, sensual experience formed part of a deliberate attempt to engender the social cohesion vital to capitalist societies grounded in consensus and economic individualism. By contrast, he determines that, 'if the aesthetic is a dangerous, ambiguous affair, it is because [ ...] there is something in the body which can revolt against the power which inscribes it'. As we shall see, the emancipatory connotations of aesthetic engagement were embedded into Cuban conceptions of culture from the outset.

As an antidote to the aloofness of Kantian aesthetics, the Italian art critic Mario de Micheli – whose work on the European artistic vanguards of the twentieth century was published in Cuba in the 1960s – cites Hegel's invocation that artistic work should be created with the people in mind, becoming representative of the epoch in a widely comprehensible way. In the context of this discussion, it is interesting to distinguish de Micheli's use of the term 'vanguard' (which was enthusiastically taken up in Cuba) from that of 'avant-garde' (which emerged in capitalist Europe). While notions of the vanguard retained their militaristic, socio-political roots, the avant-garde rejected bourgeois cultural tradition from the relative safety of the aesthetic terrain. In considering early twentieth-century Western Europe, the German literary critic Peter Bürger distinguishes an historical avant-garde, the explicit aim of which was a retreat from nineteenth-century aestheticism in favour of the elision of art and social life. This project was exemplified by Dada and surrealism, in which 'real life' objects were brought into the gallery, thereby exposing the institution of art as a prelude to its destruction. For Bürger, the second part of this project failed, serving only to reassert the autonomy of art within bourgeois society – 'its (relative) independence in the face of demands that it be socially useful'. In much the same way, the appearance of a neoavant-garde in the US from the late 1960s ultimately did little to narrow the gap between art and society.

Turning to a consideration of the second main determinant of cultural policy – the socio-economic framework provided by the state – we find that, in the UK, the late capitalist era coincided with the introduction of the ideas of the economist John Maynard Keynes into the cultural field, most directly through his 1942 appointment as chairman of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). Under Keynes's jurisdiction, CEMA would become the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), with a remit for providing state support for the arts alongside the marketplace and at arm's length from government. Top-down and paternalistic, the governing council and specialist committees of the national funding body were largely devoid of artists, thus robbing creative practitioners of any structural impact upon their fate.

This way of working continued until Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. A few months before the general election, Thatcher promised the Chairman of the Arts Council that her government would continue to support the arts; but, once elected, she cut spending in all areas of public policy, including the cultural field (reducing arts expenditure by £3 million out of a total £63 million). While the right wing of her Conservative Party called for the total abolition of ACGB, the government understood that this move would encounter resistance and decided instead to implement its policies through the existing organisation, eradicating the arm's length principle by appointing politically aligned chairmen to reshape the council.

Consistent with her belief that funding gaps should not be solely plugged by the state, Thatcher appointed Norman St John-Stevas as Arts Minister, who argued that the private sector must be looked to for new sources of cultural funding. A campaign was launched, aimed at doubling the 1979 figure for private arts sponsorship of £3–4 million, and St John-Stevas established a fourteen-member sponsorship committee which included corporate executives and offered tax relief to businesses supporting the arts. A special grant was made to the Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts, which was responsible for brokering deals between corporate sponsors and cultural institutions, and a tirade was launched against the 'welfare state mentality' that the government perceived to exist among arts organisations. Throughout the 1980s, ACGB was prevailed upon to outline new business ideas and compelled to advocate private support (specifically business sponsorship) to its core- funded organisations. Museums were exposed to market forces and businessmen were appointed to their boards, in a bid to make them more enterprising. This 'harnessing of the power of corporate capital into what had hitherto, at least in Britain, been an almost exclusively public domain' meant that arts organisations found themselves competing with each other to attract sponsorship.

Multinational companies began to involve themselves in the sponsorship of exhibitions and in giving awards to artists. During this time, the corporate approach to sponsoring the arts moved from the passive provision of solicited donations to the proactive deployment of funds as part of a targeted public relations strategy, marking a shift from a 'something for nothing' attitude to a climate of 'something for something'. This became part of a two-pronged attack which either made a connection between the brand and exhibition – exemplified by the distribution of a drinks manufacturer's product at a private view – or aimed to improve the corporate image, which proved especially useful for companies whose brands (alcohol, tobacco, oil or armaments) were in need of burnishing in the public eye. In addition, sponsors came to expect lavish receptions at which they could entertain their guests, providing them with a seemingly apolitical space in which politicians could be met and lobbied.

While a similar history may be traced in relation to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Reagan administration from 1980 onwards, the association between culture and commerce dates back further in the US. In 1976, Hans Haacke was invited to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and conducted some prescient research into the relationship between art and business as evinced by the museum's trustees. David Rockefeller – a banker from a wealthy and influential dynasty, whose brother, Nelson, was Governor of New York State and would go on to become Vice President under Gerald Ford – was chairman of the board of trustees at MoMA, and Haacke quotes him as saying that:

From an economic standpoint, [corporate] involvement in the arts can mean direct and tangible benefits.

It can provide a company with extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation, and an improved corporate image.

It can build better customer relations, a readier acceptance of company products, and a superior appraisal of their quality.

Promotion of the arts can improve the morale of employees and help attract qualified personnel.

Having promoted corporate intervention into the arts at the museum level during the Conservative era (1979–97), the UK government under the Labour Party (1997–2007) prompted the devolved arts councils in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to turn their attention to other ways of supplementing state support of artists. In the first place, the private market for art had been growing in parallel with finance capitalism since the stock market crash of 1987, leaving the US accounting for around half the global market and the UK for around a quarter. During the New Labour era, this burgeoning market was bolstered by the arts councils – through direct measures including the subsidy of commercial galleries and the introduction of interest-free loans for art collectors – thereby eroding the notion of public sector funding bodies operating alongside the marketplace. In 2004, Arts Council England commissioned a report from private consultants, entitled Taste Buds: How to Cultivate the Art Market, which unequivocally placed the flourishing private market at the centre of the art system and examined how it could be better exploited, identifying 6.1 million potential collectors of contemporary art. In the process, all the elements of what had traditionally been regarded as the public sphere – from art school and artist-led activity to non-commercial gallery – were rendered subordinate to the market.

A year earlier, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had observed with regret that 'what is currently happening to the universes of artistic production throughout the developed world is entirely novel and truly without precedent: the hard won independence of cultural production and circulation is being threatened, in its very principle, by the intrusion of commercial logic at every stage'. As a consequence, those working in the highly professionalised and individualistic contemporary cultural field in the capitalist world face a situation in which it can be argued that 'The international art market is the sole mechanism for conferring value onto art'. The potency of the market and the competitiveness it engenders mean that many artistic investigations are driven by financial considerations. This implies 'the total subordination of work contents to profit motives, and a fading of the critical potencies of works in favour of a training in consumer attitudes'. Indeed, the general trend since 1979 has been that 'aesthetics has triumphed over ethics as a prime focus of social and intellectual concern', leading to a relentless pursuit of formal innovation at the expense of political content. As might be expected, this departure is celebrated by conservative critics for whom 'the ending of modernism did not happen too soon [because] the art world of the seventies was filled with artists [...] putting art at the service of this or that personal or political goal'.

At the same time, recent US and European policy has tended to value culture according to its perceived contribution to economic recovery, spearheaded by what the US urban studies theorist Richard Florida calls the 'creative class'. This doctrine conceives 'the highest order of creative work as producing new forms or designs that are readily transferable and widely useful – such as designing a product that can be widely made, sold and used; coming up with a theorem or strategy that can be applied in many cases; or composing music that can be performed again and again', which discriminates against the one-off productions of artists. In much the same way, the creative industries – which are increasingly being prioritised for state funding throughout the European Union – are defined as 'those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property'. The creative industries are typically taken to include advertising, architecture, computer games, crafts, design, fashion, film and video, music, performing arts, publishing, software, TV and radio. The only point at which art has typically been mentioned within this rhetoric is in relation to its commercial market (where it is aligned with antiques).

In May 2010, in his first major speech as UK Prime Minister, David Cameron identified a key part of recovery from the 2007–8 economic crisis to reside in support for knowledge-based industries, including the creative industries. Five months later, Arts Council England was informed that its subsidy would be cut by £100 million in 2014, which led 206 cultural organisations to be dropped from the national funding portfolio. At the same time, arts organisations have been compelled to think of themselves as social centres and argue their worth in terms of increased participation (rather than passive spectatorship). In April 2013, the then UK Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Maria Miller, gave a speech to arts and cultural leaders which again placed culture centre stage in the return to economic growth. Against the backdrop of funding cuts, this presumed that 'the public funding distributed by the Arts Council should effectively act as seed funding, or venture capital: giving confidence to others to invest in the creativity and innovation of our cultural organisations'. Such investment, she foresaw, would be drawn from the commercial or philanthropic sectors.