Culture At A Price

Where would we be without the plenitude of statistics that inform every last bit of Mallorcan and Spanish life? An awful lot less bored probably. To the diligent data collection performed at national level, we must add the micro-managerialism of the Balearics own mathematically minded. The islands' statistics institute has been bean-counting around in local cultural life in contributing to the national annual report into cultural stats. Yes, every last thing is entered into Excel, given a percentage, an average and a comparison. It is numerical Nirvana.

It doesn't come as a huge surprise to learn that spending on culture (broadly defined to include entertainment as well as the more high-brow) has fallen. This descent into Philistinism is not as pronounced in the Balearics as some other parts of Spain, but spending slumped by nearly 7% in 2009. The growth areas were home entertainment and the internet, which are culturally questionable, and the theatre, which isn't. Live music performance has been one of the biggest losers.

The staggering precision of these statistics is that we are told that in 2009 there were 11,378 popular musical concerts in the Balearics. Who on earth counts this stuff and why? Indeed, how do they count it? The decline in concerts was to the tune of 1,541 and the number of spectators fell by 132,000. This is mind-boggling in terms of its apparent uselessness.

Nevertheless, a snapshot of cultural health or sickness has some merit in allowing for general quality of life to be gauged. So the number-crunching is not completely useless. What is unclear from that figure for concerts is how many, if any, were free. There is an awful lot of culture in Mallorca which doesn't cost anything, such as that during fiestas or staged thanks to the generosity of town halls or whoever. But this free culture isn't free because much of it comes out of the public purse, which means taxpayers' money.

As a very rudimentary guide, let me give an example of what this costs. In Santa Margalida a couple of years ago, they proposed raising the annual spending on fiestas to around 800,000 euros. The town has a registered population of roughly 10,600. 75 euros per person for the fiestas in the town, Can Picafort and Son Serra, and a goodly chunk of this goes up in smoke in a short period - the half an hour it takes to send rockets into the sky. Well, fireworks are culture, are they not?

75 euros doesn't sound a lot, except of course it isn't distributed evenly, while there are plenty who pay not a centimo - tourists and those from other towns. Sometimes there is an attempt to generate income, as was the case with the Carl Cox concert in Can Picafort this summer. Free to residents of the town, it cost up to 35 euros a pop for anyone else, and wasn't that well-attended, probably as a consequence and despite Cox's celebrity.

A question arises with this "free" culture as to whether, rather than simply compiling numbers, anyone ever indulges in some more meaningful maths, as in conducting a cost-benefit analysis. If income to a town, through its bars, restaurants and so on, outstrips the costs of putting on events, then fine. But it would be nice to know if it actually does.

Of course, one can argue that even running at a loss should not matter, as fiestas and their like are all part of "cultural life". True, but this highlights the nebulous nature of what cultural life actually means, especially to visitors.

That great example of specious statistics gathering, tourism spend, has, as one of its core measurements, money tourists spend on "excursions". The problem with this is that excursions are undefined. They can mean anything from a trip to an historic site or to Pirates and Marineland, and I rather suspect that it normally means the latter two. Both are "cultural" in the broadest sense of the word, but neither qualifies as cultural tourism of the sort tourism bodies have in mind.

Buried within the report into cultural spending is a rather telling statistic (yes, there is one). It is the fact that the number of visitors to the Balearics in 2009 who came for cultural purposes fell. Don't ask how they arrive at the figure; let's just accept that they do. As cultural tourism is supposed to be such an important element of "alternative" tourism, such a decline does not lend support to this importance. And again, one has to ask what the visitor means by cultural purposes.

Where this report is good is that it does at least attempt to distinguish between different cultural activities, and it is this specificity is what is missing from information we are fed about tourists. If this were to be forthcoming, then we might be able to form a better appreciation as to what culture means to tourists, but one has the suspicion that the vagueness of the concept is rather as tourism bodies prefer it. This-a-way it can mean anything you like. But whatever it means, it will still cost, and there will be a statistician to put a figure to it.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.