Several authors have examined the instrumental use and rhetoric of cultural policy. The discussion has been diverse and fruitful, including arguments about or against its alleged social impact (Merli 2002; Bennett and Belfiore 2008), its design and function as intrinsic or extrinsic (Ahearne 2009), proper and display (Williams 1984; McGuigan 2004), its use as resource (Yúdice 2003) or plainly in the terms of bullshit (Belfiore 2009).

In this paper we will analyse how cultural policy as well as cultural displays used in more general forms of public policy, have been increasingly deployed as “performative policies” which give an impression of attending to social justice demands while not actually addressing them or even taking misleadingly labelled opposing actions. While this is an international issue, it will here be addressed in the specific context of contemporary Mexico, with a focus on two entities which are partially independent of each other yet intrinsically connected –
the Mexican federal government, currently headed by president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the National Autonomous Mexican University (UNAM), the nation’s enormous and vastly influential public institution of higher education.

This interdisciplinary work will rely on a framework referring not only to afore mentioned works of cultural policy studies, but also give room to Mexican authors and their relevant notions of cultural misappropriation and loss of cultural control (e.g. Aguilar, Bonfil Batalla) and the work on performativity, gesticulation and hypocrisy as political strategies by Usigli.

The research has led towards numerous instances of a misleading use of cultural policy as display, especially with reference to the contentious issues of indigenous and gender rights, but also with regard to methods of what may be called “branding through culture”. As such, the president has carried out performative actions as forms of legitimisation and institutionalised marketing, for instance misappropriating the indigenous symbol of the command staff by first choreographing a folkloric delivery to him at the beginning of his government and then using it both as a metaphor and ritual ceremony for the successor of his political movement. At the same time, federal cultural policies – in striking difference, for example, with those of other Latin American countries such as Colombia or Bolivia – pay almost no attention to cultural rights of the countries’ many indigenous groups. On a different level, the word “humanism” has been used as an arguably deceitful form of branding: the president named his government “Mexican humanism”, while assigning the Ministry of Culture its lowest budget in decades.

Despite several universities’ autonomy, this conceptual extractivism has began to trickle down to their public sphere. The presentation will show how, for example, in the National University (UNAM), academics from other disciplines, such as dentistry, that hold admin posts may give a Ted Talk titled “Towards a Critical Humanism” or promote their action plans and themselves as “humanist”, while neglecting libraries. These politicians know little about the field and have it far from their budgetary priorities but adopt the terminology aiming to be associated to some of its values, such as ethics, in order to pursue more power and popularity. This has also been the case with events about gender rights and equality, where people or buildings may wear certain colours on specific dates in a seasonal parade, photographs of which will be promoted on social media as a sign of change, with no real results in the lives of many of its community members.

Finally, the presentation will discuss some risks associated with this “post-truth” usage of cultural policy and displays and ask whether it is possible to safeguard their multiple ethical and cultural functions.

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