Measuring the culture sector in terms of economic activity is always bound to fall short of one’s expectations because its value is always more than monetary. 

At the same time, however, we cannot remove the financial aspect from the equation because this will make it unsustainable.

I believe that culture in Gozo has oscillated like a pendulum from too much on one side, to too much on the other. There were times when culture was measured by profits. 

In the lack of economies of scale that plagues any small place like Gozo, it was often considered not worth pursuing. Then culture became heavily dependent on government funding  and that is problematic on so many fronts.

A government’s duty is to support culture and not compete against artists, cultural organisations and institutions it is meant to sustain. A government’s duty is to support culture by, for example, providing aid and an infrastructure, driving arts education to excellence, creating the right platforms and helping the culture industry to stand on its own two feet.

It is not a government’s duty to make the culture industry totally dependent on its grants, or, worse, to dish out grants on the precondition that the cultural product goes to the public absolutely free of charge, or, worse still, that it makes absolutely no return on investment. 

Neither is it the government’s duty to enter the market, which the industry has been trying so hard to make viable, and offer the same thing for free; in other words, making the public believe that culture is only worth appreciating when it’s for free and once there is culture at a market price it is shunned. 

What a government’s duty is not is making us believe that culture needs no private corporate support because there’s the government for that kind of stuff; or telling private industry that it’s the government that is paying, an, therefore, it is safe to inflate prices when servicing the world of arts and culture.

Now, that may not necessarily be the case in Malta but it is definitely what is happening in Gozo. 

I now expect a chorus of government apologists to take a cheap dig at this line of thought and claim that I am advocating against free-of-charge culture or that the PN wants the public to pay for culture. But that is absolutely not the point here.

The point is that we need to shift from having a government that buys culture to anaesthetise the public with a free-of-charge feel-good factor to one that supports a culture that enriches the well-being of an island.We need to shift from ‘buying’ projects to control their narrative, to ‘supporting’ cultural creations. 

We need to move from supporting a project to supporting the institutions and the infrastructure, if we want sustainability.

In the context of volunteer activism, for example, supporting the institution means giving value to the volunteers, their hours and their input, rather than take them for granted. 

As things stand, supporting the arts in Gozo looks attractive and popular for the masses but it is neither smart, nor is it sustainable.

Alex Borg is the Nationalist Party’s spokesperson on Gozo.