The False Myth That Culture Does Not Produce

Every now and then, the same phrase returns: art does not produce, the humanities are useless, sociology does not make money, anthropology is a luxury, art history is an elegant conversation for those who already have free time. But behind that idea there is no economic pragmatism, only a deeply limited way of understanding what it means to produce value.

Very often, these premises are evaluated with the wrong tools. If something does not immediately turn into revenue, quarterly productivity, or visible growth on an Excel spreadsheet, it is treated as useless. But that view is not only poor; it is also incorrect.

Recent data from the global art market shows that we are talking about a large-scale international economy. According to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026, global art market sales grew by 4% in 2025 and reached 59.6 billion dollars. The gallery and dealer sector reached 34.8 billion, while public auctions grew by 9%, reaching 20.7 billion. In addition, the volume of transactions reached 41.5 million in 2025.

In other words, art is not a marginal pastime of enlightened elites. It is a global, financial, logistical, symbolic, and geopolitical market. Although it is a concentrated market — the United States, the United Kingdom, and China accounted for 76% of global sales by value in 2025 — this does not invalidate the argument. On the contrary, it opens up a question for Latin America: how can a region with such a powerful cultural production continue to occupy a peripheral place within international structures of valuation?

The Latin American case appears intermittently, often associated with established names. In 2025, Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) was sold for 54.7 million dollars at Sotheby’s, surpassing the previous auction record for Latin American art. But that is precisely the problem: we cannot rely solely on the exceptional status of Frida, Rivera, Lam, or Botero to prove that Latin American art has value. The challenge is to build infrastructure so that this value appears as an ecosystem: galleries, archives, criticism, collecting, fairs, research, education, digital circulation, and public policies.

Moreover, culture is not limited to the art market. Cultural and creative industries have a much broader economic weight. UNESCO stated in 2025 that cultural and creative industries represent 3.39% of global GDP and 3.55% of total employment, while cultural tourism in 250 cities generated 741.3 billion dollars in 2023. UNCTAD, for its part, estimates that cultural and creative industries generate almost 2.3 trillion dollars annually and contribute 3.1% of global GDP. It also includes UNESCO estimates according to which the sector represents 6.2% of global employment.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the IDB estimates that the creative economy represents 124 billion dollars, 2.2% of regional GDP, and 1.9 million jobs. In Brazil, Firjan’s mapping shows that creative GDP has exceeded 3% of national GDP since 2021 and reached 3.59% in 2023, with 1.262 million formally employed creative professionals.

So, when people say that culture “does not produce,” we should ask: compared to what? Which sectors have we decided to recognize as productive? And according to what criteria? Culture does not only generate direct revenue; it also activates tourism, education, intellectual property, youth employment, design, audiovisual production, video games, music, publishing, fashion, gastronomy, heritage, digital platforms, and urban economies.

But reducing the defense of culture to “it also makes money” would mean falling into the same trap. Culture matters economically, yes, but its deepest value does not always fit within the logic of immediate monetization.

In 2019, the World Health Organization published a review on art, health, and well-being that synthesized evidence from more than 3,000 studies. The report identified an important role for the arts in disease prevention, health promotion, and the management and treatment of illness throughout life. This evidence makes the idea of culture as secondary entertainment insufficient, since it suggests that participating in artistic practices, attending cultural spaces, singing, dancing, painting, reading, writing, or taking part in collective experiences can have concrete effects on mental health, isolation, stress, memory, identity, and the ability to navigate moments of crisis.

With these data in mind, we can affirm that culture organizes. It gives language where there is trauma, builds memory where there has been violence, opens community where there is fragmentation, and allows us to imagine futures when reality seems to be managed only through urgency.

George Yúdice had already argued that culture became a strategic resource for addressing social problems, from exclusion to violence and urban reactivation. But if culture is expected to repair the social fabric, then it cannot be treated as an ornamental expense. If it is asked to educate, include, heal, represent, democratize, pacify, and generate identity, it must also be funded, professionalized, and protected.

Martha Nussbaum formulates this from another perspective: when societies cut the humanities in order to privilege only technical training or immediate profitability, they weaken the capacities that sustain democracy, such as critical thinking, moral imagination, empathy, argumentation, and historical understanding. Nuccio Ordine, in The Usefulness of the Useless, insists that what does not seem useful under the logic of immediate benefit may be precisely what makes a freer, more complex, and more dignified human life possible.

The contempt directed at artists, art historians, sociologists, anthropologists, curators, researchers, writers (and the list could go on) does not come from an economic truth. It comes from reducing life to visible productivity. They are accused of “not producing money” while increasingly mediocre, anxious, isolated ways of living are normalized, unable to imagine meaning beyond performance.

Culture is not a luxury. Nor is it a romantic refuge separated from the economy. It is social, economic, and symbolic infrastructure. And as long as global discourses continue to treat it as secondary, they will continue to misunderstand art, the economy, health, and collective life.