MADRID: For the government, it's a target for crisis taxes and cuts like any other: the subsidised arts sector. For actors, artists and audiences, it's Spain's moral lifeblood, bleeding away in the recession.
The arts in Spain including the big film sector that gave the world Pedro Almodovar is in peril from a sharp rise in sales tax that will drive away audiences, top cultural figures say.
"They are generally killing the cultural activity in this country," said one of the country's best-known actors, Oscar-winning Javier Bardem, as he joined in a street protest in Madrid on July 19.
"It's a country that produces great culture and is very well recognised outside our frontiers," he told AFP. "But what they are doing is to really minimise the cultural industry in this country."
Spanish schools and hospitals have been suffering for months from budget tightening measures aimed at lowering the public deficit, which have drawn hundreds of thousands of protestors onto the streets.
The government insists its austere reforms will strengthen the economy in the long run, but economists warn measures such as the rise in sales tax from September 1 will hit consumption and depress the economy further.
Spaniards have already been curbing their spending on cultural pursuits and the industry warns the tax rise will be the final blow.
"I go out much less," said Cristina Rial, a Madrid resident of 28. Unemployed, like one in four Spanish workers, for the past year, she has cut her weekly outings to concerts and shows down to virtually none.
"I have to eat and live. Everything else is a luxury," she said. "It shouldn't be, but it is."
Artists say the subsidy cuts threaten the intangible long-term benefits of culture in a country still marked by its 1936-1939 Civil War.
The war saw one of Spain's greatest poets, Federico Garcia Lorca, shot dead by Francoist soldiers. The next four decades of dictatorship and censorship drove its most influential film maker Luis Bunuel into exile.
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