The Post-Cultural State
The bureaucracies that govern cultural life today are fundamentally uninterested in cultivating a proper sense of what art is, what it is ‘for’, and how new creations converse with the existing canon, notes Lola Salem
in Engelsberg Ideas. A cultural malaise has quietly eroded the West’s confidence in its creativity, reshaping how art is funded, judged, and understood. She suggests that “When no common symbolic ground is preserved, and when public institutions abandon the task of positively articulating who we are, and where we have come from, culture ceases to create new associations and instead stimulates the polarisation it should, under ideal conditions, ameliorate.” The state simply cannot be agnostic about culture, precisely because culture is, or should be, the living expression of principles which sustain and nourish our way of life. It is a link to the past, and a powerful way to access the human condition.
https://engelsbergideas.com
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