Dystopia & Subsistence: Notes about the impact of the sanitary crisis on Ecuadorian Cultural Industry

Abstract

In this work, we use a production model analogy to study the operation of the cultural industry in Ecuador during the COVID-19 crisis. The performance of the cultural industry before and after the crisis was evaluated considering education processes in the arts as a development input, artists as producers and cultural spaces and institutions as distribution and exchange places. To do this, we used i) a Business Impact Analysis model -BIA-, ii) management indicators developed by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage's, and iii) the results of the 2020 Survey of Working Conditions of Artistic and Cultural Workers, carried out by the Observatory of Cultural Policy and Economics of the Latin American Institute for Research in the Arts -ILIA-.  The impact of the COVID19 crisis on the production process of cultural products is described and strategies to stimulate the recovery of the sector and sustain its activities are discussed.

Keywords: Cultural industries, global crisis, culture and economics, Critical Theory, counterhegemony