How Swedish Government Used Artists to Hide Persuasion Campaigns
Swedish agencies in the 1970s-80s hired cultural workers to produce health, aid, and immigration messaging that concealed its persuasive intent behind artistic credibility. The strategy reveals how governments obscure propaganda through creative intermediaries—a tactic with implications for modern communications and policy transparency.
Originaltitel: The Information-by-Proxy Strategy: Cultural Policy as a Media Tactic in Swedish Governmental Information
<p>This chapter studies the production processes of information funded by Swedish government agencies in the 1970s and 1980s, made with attitude- and behavioural-changing purposes. The aim is to historicise entanglements between cultural policy and information practices in non-cultural policy areas. Employing an information-by-proxy strategy, Swedish non-cultural agencies utilised cultural workers to produce “creative” information and to obscure persuading intents, yet the agencies became dependent on the cultural proxies for artistically enhanced information. Empirically, to examine this phenomenon, examples are used from three areas of politics: health, foreign aid, and immigration, drawn from archival sources. The chapter examines: (1) the tactics and objectives involved in the rapprochement between agencies and cultural workers and (2) how we can trace and conceptualise material produced by cultural workers as governmental information along with the resulting ambiguities regarding content and sender which the strategy led to. Problematising the concepts of instrumentalisation and policy attachment in cultural policy research and operationalising the notion of artification drawn from aesthetic theory, the chapter shows that culture was not instrumentalised in traditional terms – to legitimise its own existence as a policy field – but to strengthen non-cultural policy fields through its power to artistically enhance – or artify – governmental information. </p>