The end of the Ministry of Culture and both its benefits and detriments

After the former Vice-President of Brazil, Michel Temer, assumed the Chair of President due to the temporary leave of the former President, Dilma Rousseff, a new ministerial staff was announced by the Interim President, which led some parcel of population to be enraged by the extinction of some ministries and the junction of some of them in one only Ministry. The most commented, however, was the end of the Ministry of Culture and its union with the Ministry of Education, making both areas being reduced to Departments. Meanwhile some people was feeling outraged by the extinction of the Ministry because of the devaluation of culture in nowadays’ Brazil, there are some others who do believe it was the best due to all problems involving the resources’ distribution by the public agency. Both sides have their reasons to defend whichever they want to, but my job here is to analyse the facts and lead you to a great deep reflection.

Before 2016, the Ministry of Culture had been separated from the Ministry of Education since 1985, when the former President, José Sarney, promoted the division of MEC (standing for Ministry of Education and Culture) – this first Ministry was founded in 1953. The separation happened to promote a bigger public interest in arts, because the sector hadn’t been enough valued in Brazil since the beginning of the dictatorial period – the censorship was responsible for throwing the arts into marginality until the re-democratization of the country. However, since then, the Ministry was targeted many times as irresponsible due to its constant troubles with public funds’ distribution and the dependency of tax incentives and financial support from private and public companies, such as Caixa Econômica Federal, Petrobrás, etc.

The most emblematic problem involving the use of public funds by the Ministry of Culture was the creation of Rouanet Law, a federal law created to distribute funds for cultural projects, in order to further encourage culture and access to it for the population. Theoretically an excellent idea, the law had promoted many mistakes due to irregularities in the process of fund-raising and, above all, had left the responsibility of dividing the funds to the companies involved in the cultural market, which led to illegal enrichments, an unjust and unilateral selection of projects which might or might not receive incentives, and financial favouritism for certain artists already known to the public that allowed larger investment amounts than usual to less famous projects.

There are some bizarre projects that received money from the Rouanet Law, leading people to distrust the seriousness of this tax incentive. Just to cite some, we can point to the recording of MC Guimê’s live DVD (Guimê is a very rich and famous singer of funk carioca genre, and invoices around $84,000 monthly, received $145,000 from the government to record his new live concert); the poetry blog “O Mundo Precisa de Poesia”, written by singer Maria Bethânia (in order to publish daily new poems in the blog, the singer received $381,000 from tax incentives to pay her expenses with the website); the financial support to singer Luan Santana’s national tour (Santana is a singer of sertanejo genre, whose fortune is estimated in $8,45 millions, pocketed $1,15 million to make a tour through the whole country, in order to broadcast the sertanejo genre everywhere); the financial support to singer Cláudia Leitte’s tour (Leitte is as famous as Luan Santana, has a fortune estimated in $5,64 millions, and pocketed $1,7 million from tax incentives to tour Brazil); and, finally, the series of concerts by maestro João Carlos Martins that never happened and which incentive the musician never requested (an enterprise, without the knowledge or consent of the maestro, requested tax incentives and received $7 millions – after the scandal, the maestro ordered the company to give the money back to the National Treasury, and sued it for involving his name in an illegal procedure of corruption and money laundering.

The dismemberment of the Ministry into a Department of Culture was seen by many artists as one more proof of the illegitimate government by Michel Temer, but they forget that both Culture and Education have been walking together in Brazil’s history since a long time ago and that their union is not any news to politics. The ones in favour of the extinction claims that the Ministry’s infrastructure was already too damaged and that a complete housecleaning was in urgent order.

However, what it is most urgent to solve amidst this is the irregularities attributed to Rouanet Law because the Brazilian economy finds itself stuck in a crisis and, by the capitalist think, the arts are not an essential basic need to people – at least, not as essential as water, air, electric energy, petrol, agriculture, livestock, or any other necessaries. By the other side, arts incentive is utterly important to any culture and social structure, so it must have some public company to take care of this part – no matter if it is a Ministry, a Department, a Section, or anything – so, the ones complaining about the new Department must remember that, while culture doesn’t earn enough importance again to be put once more as a Ministry, we need to accept and help the Department in order to not leave the culture behind, because we still need it near us.

Independently if you accept or not the governmental regime, you might support Marcelo Calero, the new Secretary of Culture, to continue the actual projects directed to the arts’ promotion and free access to them by the low-income population. Invading buildings once occupied by the Ministry and promoting wild riots in an attempt to call attention is not the solution, but keep on going to the theatre and cultural events promoted by the public companies is.