Crisis provokes cultural hemorrhage

The hemorrhage is constant and apparently unstoppable. The patient - Spain's cultural infrastructure - is losing blood fast. Not a day goes by without a film or theater festival shutting down, or else becoming a biennial event or going into hibernation mode in the hope that the winter of crisis will finally give way to the spring of hope.

Besides the private entrepreneurs who are throwing in the towel, it is chiefly the depleted public coffers that are at the root of all these cuts - and most particularly the regional coffers. As for the central Culture Ministry, new spending cuts are expected following the November 20 general elections (see box), when the budgets are set to be trimmed back again. The last budget cuts affected all cultural sectors, from the state film agency the ICAA (11.7 percent) to the Prado Museum (7.7 percent).

At the regional level, Valencia has become something of a paradigm for the general situation. Last Friday, it was announced that MTV Winter, an international rock event, will no longer be held at the mammoth City of Arts and Sciences, a true symbol of the years of plenty. More importantly, the festival will no longer benefit from the annual one-million-euro check that the Valencian government had handed over for the last four years.

But that's not even the worst case. The biggest victim of the spending cuts, so far at least, is the Mostra de Valencia, a film festival with a 30-year history. The city, which is run by Rita Barberá of the Popular Party (PP), will save 1.7 million euros by withdrawing support for it. Valencia will also save a further 600,000 euros by no longer underwriting the València Escena Oberta (VEO) alternative theater festival, which was poised to reach its 10th edition next year.

A middle-of-the-road solution is the model embraced by the Punto de Vista documentary film festival in Pamplona, which is eight years old and runs on a 300,000-euro budget. After the government of Navarre started taking a whack at cultural spending, festival organizers decided to make Punto de Vista a biennial event. So did the people behind the Actual Festival in Logroño: the first musical event of the year will now be held every other January. Meanwhile, the well-known La Mar de Músicas summer music showcase in Cartagena will reduce its program from three weeks to one, after the government of Murcia decided to stop sending its annual check for 150,000 euros. And last but not least, the Socialist-run government of Andalusia recently announced that it will no longer sponsor the Málaga Film Festival or the European Film Festival in Seville.

Culture workers seem resigned to hearing that the Murcia Auditorium will no longer program opera, or that the Mu-Danzas contemporary dance festival will be no more. Alas, faced with the drama of five million unemployed Spaniards, everyone accepts that a conceptual art exhibition cannot be a priority for anyone.

And so it was that the farewell event for gallery owner Soledad Lorenzo, held last Thursday in Madrid, also became a platform for an exchange of sob stories and the collective admission that the sector is still paying ("who knows for how much longer?") for the mistakes of a past filled with folly and extravagance - a full decade of cultural infrastructure growth blown out of all proportion.

Many regionally funded art centers, born during a period of economic expansion when contemporary art suddenly became a basic commodity, are now languishing due to a lack of content and struggling to make do with what managers can scrape together on budgets that have been slashed by 50 or 60 percent compared with four years ago. Leading examples of this are the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo; the MEIAC in Extremadura; the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo; the Laboral center in Gijón and the standard-bearer, the Musac.

The colorful Musac building in León led the way in this regional trend for new, eye-catching contemporary art centers, and although it continues to offer interesting content, the frequency of its exhibitions has slowed down significantly, partly because of a sustained lack of political interest.

José Guirao, former director of the Reina Sofía contemporary art center and current head of La Casa Encendida, an alternative culture center in Madrid that gets funding from the savings bank Caja Madrid, feels that, overall, museum managers are demonstrating "a mature management of the crisis."

"They are keeping up the quality of their offering, even if there is less of it, and they continue to care for academically interesting aspects such as exhibition catalogs," he says.

Ángeles Albert, head of the state's fine arts department, admitted that "the adjustments will continue" and that the solution lies in expanding the duration of each exhibition and increasing the number of joint productions.

The incoming government will also have another major pending issue to contend with: the sponsorship law that could encourage private investors to step in and bring some relief to the sector. The Prado, for instance, benefits from money from foundations such as that of the BBVA bank. "It is evident that we need to move towards a mixed public-private funding model," said Milagros del Corral, who left her post as director of the National Library in May of last year in protest over cuts at an institution that is currently celebrating its 300th anniversary on a budget (under 1.2 million euros) that new director Glòria Pérez-Salmerón has described as "imaginative." And perhaps imagination - that crucial element of art - is the only truly valuable contribution to the sector in this post-financial debacle era.