Maksim Zhbankou: Culture Code is nothing but fake veneer

The developers of Culture Code have a retrograde understanding of culture. Instead of creating conditions for new cultural values, officials are worried about preservation of the already existing ones

It’s a praiseworthy mission per se, but the priorities are arranged in a strange way. This opinion was shared to the EuroBelarus Information Service by the cultural scientist Maksim Zhbankou.

Let us recall that the ministry of Culture of the Republic of Belarus has initiated a discussion of the Culture Code draft.

“The Code is aimed at the ensuring of the right of every person to participate in the cultural life; at the creation of legal, economic and social conditions for preservation, development and spreading of culture; at the organization, legal, financial, material and technical, personnel, information and other provision of cultural activity” – these are the words that anticipate the draft. The full text of the Culture Code can be found here.

After getting acquainted with the Code, Maksim Zhbankou saw in it only a collection of general declarations, command and directory provisions based on the notion of culture as a manageable administrative object: “The developers of the Code see culture as a collective farm, where cultural values are formed, accounted and protected; and the main thing is to appoint a permanent supervisor, which is the Ministry of Culture, so that no one steals them. The Code doesn’t have details about the mechanisms of project realization, but it has details about management and supervision mechanisms”.

The cultural scientist has found a number of humblers in the Code:

- For example, if you find a cultural value you are to give it to the state in two days. It seems interesting that the holders of the cultural values can by no means destroy them or hand them over to the armed forces of Belarus. I was especially touched by the wording that intangible cultural assets are those assets the realization of which in some material form doesn’t pervert their sense. But “Yesterday” performed by Paul McCartney or by some neighbor from your courtyard are two different things.

According to the Code, it is the state who decides who is the cultural worker and who is not. The organizer of cultural activities should get a corresponding paper; and this paper is given by superior bodies, i.e. the Ministry of Culture. The same principle that was functioning during the Soviet times works there: in order to prove that you are the creative worker you need to get a certificate of a degree, but you don’t need to create something beautiful and of great talent.

Discussion can mean different things, believes Maksim Zhbankou: “Imagine that the Ministry of Culture has submitted the project for discussion. How will the made proposals be taken into consideration? On a large scale the majority of creative people does well without the state; vice versa, the state usually is an impediment”.

The Culture Code is a fake veneer, noted the cultural scientist: “There is nothing behind the words. We have to change the system with its initially perverted vision of the very essence and destiny of culture.  Basic principles put into the document are archaic and museum-like; they are not aimed at lively development and do not reflect the modern state of cultural processes. At best they are aimed at preservation and reproduction of the existing “allowed” set-up”.