The intersection of culture and politics
Culture is more closely tied to politics than we realize. I recently explained this concept in a speech.
The speech below was held at an event in Brussels on February 15th, 2024.
Hi everyone, it’s lovely to see so many faces here. Thank you for coming.
Many of you know me, many of you don’t. My name is Ana, and I am a journalist.
I’ve always loved journalism, but I’ve never been particularly in love with political reporting.
So a year ago, I decided to fully pursue my passion: I became an arts & culture reporter. I wanted to get away from politics entirely and spend my time steeped neck-deep in art.
But in that transition, I realized there is a very rich, powerful middle ground at the intersection of culture and politics. And I began, instead, to write about that.
The intersection of culture and politics is broad. It includes, on one hand, all the programmes the European institutions themselves are implementing in the culture sector, which can be fun to cover themselves.
But it goes beyond that. I learned, in time, that culture itself can be political: it can be a powerful tool in keeping dialogue alive in a democratic society.
And that is what I want to talk to you about today. Briefly.
There are many different ways we can define culture, many aspects we can talk about. First, we can talk specifically about art.
Art is one of the building blocks of civilization. No society of historical importance has ever flourished without its own form of art.
And artists, throughout human history, have always been affected or influenced by the society in which they lived and its current political climate. Many of the currents we know by name — surrealism, expressionism, pop art — are tied to those artists’ reality.
When the first World War ended, people felt lost, anxious and lonely. This sparked expressionism, a current that used bold colors and strange shapes to show deep emotion, to show the alienation many people were feeling.
When the second World War began, many artists fled to the United States — and in consequence, making New York the center of the Western art world, taking the action away from Paris.
Pop Art, the kind of art Andy Warhol is known for, is widely believed to be when modern art turned into contemporary art — it was a direct response to capitalism, to commercialization.
Alright, so we’ve established art is linked to politics.
But we can also speak about culture in the way anthropology defines culture: “the shared way of thinking and behaving of a group of people.”
In anthropology, we use this term to refer to a group of people growing up in a society together, in the same country for example, or the same part of the world.
In that sense, culture is perhaps even more linked to politics.
Cultural heritage, for instance — keeping a society’s essence alive over time — is preserved (or not ) by government funds, or ruined during wartime. Last year, the main story on The Art Newspaper’s front page, one of the publications I read religiously now, was about all the cultural heritage sites being lost to war in Ukraine and Gaza.
In fact, since the war in Ukraine began, many working in its cultural sector have drawn attention to the fact that the country’s heritage sites are being targeted intentionally, as a way to strip them of their shared identity as a people.
Because culture is part of what makes us human, of what makes life worth living.
Both in terms of art, of being surrounded by beautiful things, but also in terms of shared traditions, and habits, and thoughts.
In Brussels, we tend to think that the cultural sector is separate from everything else: it’s not an EU competency. Going forward, though, I hope you will keep in mind how much it really is connected to many other aspects of our lives, and what life would be like if we were not surrounded by art.
We saw during the pandemic what it was like to live that way, and how much harder life would be that way.
Thank you.
Idealists Quarterly is a community that connects impact-driven people. Follow their events here. This one was held at The Nine, a co-working space in Brussels. Next up: April 18th.