site.btaWriter Georgi Gospodinov: Culture Creates Sense of Future and Community

Art and culture create a sense of the future and a sense of community, which is the opposite of what propaganda is currently doing. This is what writer Georgi Gospodinov said during the 20th World Meeting of Bulgarian Media at the BTA National Press Club in Sofia on Saturday.

Talking about culture in the media, Gospodinov described the 1990s, “If you looked at a newspaper, there was a column for Culture in the editorial board and there was a section for Culture, there were even separate sections for Art, Cinema, Literature, and so on. All that has disappeared. Of course, culture was always on the back pages, just before sports. That's a big mistake, and we'll realize it as time goes on. But that's gone too. Now culture is classified as Entertainment or Show,” the author noted.

According to him, this is a problem because the crises happening now are not purely economic or political. "They are basically crises of the horizon, crises of the deficit of a future," said Gospodinov.

The writer said that he communicates with young people and knows how anxious they are. According to him, this feeling is caused precisely by their “shortened horizon”. For a person of 18 who has now graduated from school, the world in which he is placed has a truncated future, he believes. He added that what culture and literature do is “push the horizon” a bit further.

Georgi Gospodinov noted that culture helps people to think critically. "Because it is May 24, we have heard and will hear many pathetic words. This is not part of culture. This is part of the holiday talk," he pointed out.