So what’s a new President to do, or at least to ponder? I’ll make two suggestions:
1. Give the arts and culture sector its proper prominence in government and streamline cultural administration by creating a Department of Culture. This won’t necessarily mean creating yet another lumbering bureaucracy with ill-defined functions, but will pull together—for better management and a firmer sense of purpose and direction—existing agencies such as the CCP and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and even possibly such bodies as the National Library, the National Historical Institute, the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa, the National Book Development Board, and (with apologies to my pal Krip) the MTRCB.
2. Whatever you do, Noynoy, please leave cultural and arts policy to the artists, and cultural administration to professional arts managers and administrators. Leave the politicians, socialites, retired generals and judges, hangers-on, and Presidential manicurists out the door. From your end, depoliticize cultural policy and administration. Of course, you can never really take politics out of arts and culture—our artists will keep arguing among themselves over how best to represent this and that—but it’s a debate they should be allowed to conduct as peers, and with their own constituencies.
Your predecessor made a mockery of the National Artist selection process—a relatively minor issue affecting just a few people, but highly indicative of the way arts and culture have been treated by our political leaders with callous disregard. Trust Filipino artists with their own judgments, and they will help restore our sense of ourselves, and help define our investment in a shared future.
So what’s a new President to do, or at least to ponder? I’ll make two suggestions:
1. Give the arts and culture sector its proper prominence in government and streamline cultural administration by creating a Department of Culture. This won’t necessarily mean creating yet another lumbering bureaucracy with ill-defined functions, but will pull together—for better management and a firmer sense of purpose and direction—existing agencies such as the CCP and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and even possibly such bodies as the National Library, the National Historical Institute, the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa, the National Book Development Board, and (with apologies to my pal Krip) the MTRCB.
2. Whatever you do, Noynoy, please leave cultural and arts policy to the artists, and cultural administration to professional arts managers and administrators. Leave the politicians, socialites, retired generals and judges, hangers-on, and Presidential manicurists out the door. From your end, depoliticize cultural policy and administration. Of course, you can never really take politics out of arts and culture—our artists will keep arguing among themselves over how best to represent this and that—but it’s a debate they should be allowed to conduct as peers, and with their own constituencies.
Your predecessor made a mockery of the National Artist selection process—a relatively minor issue affecting just a few people, but highly indicative of the way arts and culture have been treated by our political leaders with callous disregard. Trust Filipino artists with their own judgments, and they will help restore our sense of ourselves, and help define our investment in a shared future.
Posted 1 year ago Notes
