Culture maker: Art as emancipatory expression

Abstract

The essay argues that every human being is a maker of culture and that art is culture because it arises from work and from the sensitivity of the hands. It describes how the dominant classes co-opted art and culture and integrated them into the ideological state apparatuses, with the school as the dominant apparatus since the nineteenth century, a cooptation that legitimizes forms of symbolic violence such as beauty canons and the hierarchy between high art and popular art. It proposes reclaiming the school as a cultural space, with teachers as a collective acting as the agents of this shift within the 2022 Curriculum (Plan de Estudio 2022), through four functions of art as emancipatory expression: making the subject aware of their historical construction, sensitizing them through the expression of their vulnerability, stimulating their imagination and creativity, and taking action in the world, with published studies that illustrate each function.