We need to talk about PNAB, and we need to do it now. Not in a year, when the damage will be greater and more difficult to reverse, but at this exact moment, when the policy has already completed a first cycle and is in the second, enough time to clearly show what is working and what is collapsing. The Aldir Blanc National Policy, called the largest cultural policy in the country, has already shown its limitations, and dissatisfaction in the cultural and artistic sector stopped being a murmur and became a clamor. Whoever is on the front lines, registering projects, waiting for results, reading opinions, preparing resources, knows what I’m talking about. There is a thick frustration in the air, made up of confusing calls, rushed deadlines, platforms that get stuck, disjointed evaluations and a persistent feeling that politics, which should bring public power closer to cultural agents and artists, is doing the opposite, digging distance. Discussing the PNAB now is not disloyalty to a conquest that I defend. It’s the only way to protect it while there’s still time.
I’ve been saying it for a long time, and I’m not alone. Along with many others, I have pointed out the fragility of calls when they become the almost sole instrument for promoting culture and the arts. In April 2025, I wrote about what I called the collapse of the calls, the realization that this formula, transformed into the main and often exclusive financing tool, had reached its limit. I returned to the topic other times, from the difference between art and culture to the outline of a new paradigm, which I presented in another text at the end of that year (www.andantecultura.com.br). I always made a point clear that I repeat here. I am not against calls as a tool. I am against the “call” of culture, against this reduction of all cultural policy to an endless succession of public calls, as if there were no other way for the resource to reach those who believe. The calls were, at the time, an excellent counterpoint to influence peddling and clientelism; But thirty years passed, and what was a remedy became, in many cases, the disease. And what the PNAB did, in many places, perhaps in most of them, was to take that logic to a paroxysm. It became a factory of calls, an assembly line that produces call after call, and with them a succession of errors, improvisations and precariousness. The machinery rotates, consumes the energy of the sector, and delivers less and less meaning. It is time to stop, look at what we built and ask, boldly, if there is not a better way, a redesign of the PNAB.
Searching, debating, imagining other models and urgently perfecting the policy is not abandoning it. It means taking it seriously.
The Aldir Blanc did not fall from the sky nor was it born from a cabinet decree. It was torn off. It came from one of the most impressive mobilizations that the Brazilian cultural field has ever carried out, built at the worst possible moment, within a government that treated culture as an enemy, that extinguished the Ministry, that persecuted artists, that tried to suffocate the sector through budgetary and symbolic starvation. It was precisely in the margins and shadows of that period that cultural workers from all over the country, from the large centers to the most remote cities, organized themselves, occupied networks, pressured parliamentarians, wrote proposals, and did what seemed impossible: transform an “emergency” into state policy. It was the first time that federal cultural resources reached, on a mandatory and continuous basis, to all the municipalities of the country, even those that had never had a culture secretariat, a convocation, or a cultural policy worthy of the name. It is democratic in its origin, capillary in its scope, and has a power of mobilization that few Brazilian cultural policies had. The PNAB is, above all, an achievement, and achievements must be defended. And that is why the moment demands care. A policy won with so much struggle can be lost, not by a blow, hopefully, but by wear and tear. If in each cycle the sector that built it feels more distant, more mistreated, more suffocated by confusing calls, absurd rulings and lines that humiliate those who were approved, but not contemplated, then the enchantment fades. And a policy without enchantment, without the emotional and militant support of those who support it, remains orphaned at the moment of danger. When the next budget attack comes, and there has already been one in 2025, who will defend the PNAB if the sector itself will have already given up on it due to exhaustion? Defending the Aldir Blanc today is, above all, preventing the way it was executed from killing the enthusiasm that generated it.
Those who follow the cultural and artistic sector throughout Brazil perceive that dissatisfaction with the execution of the PNAB became a national chorus, with the same melody repeated in different accents. In several states and cities, the cultural press recorded complaints of inconsistent opinions and stories of evaluators paid too little to judge a hundred projects in a short time, in addition to accusations of inappropriate use of artificial intelligence. In Minas, the Secretary of State for Culture itself recognized calculation errors and republished results, including final results, while entities in the sector presented extrajudicial notification against a complete call. From north to south, the same complaints resonate: absurd rulings, platforms that do not work, rules that change in the middle of the process, administrative resources that seem like bureaucratic staging. When the same defect appears in states governed by different parties, with different administrative teams and cultures, it is a sign that the problem is not in this or that management. The problem is in the model. And it is the model, not just its operators, that needs to be rethought.
Minas Gerais as a symptom As I am from Mineiro, I now want to go down to the terrain of Minas and the Gerais, and for that I need to start by explaining the analysis cut that I did and I am going to present here. Of the entire PNAB of Minas Gerais, second cycle, I chose to analyze two calls: Call 01/2026, for Cultural Scholarships, and Call 04/2026, for Cultural Execution, direct promotion. I left out the calls for awards and those for Cultura Viva, since I am interested in thinking here about the place of the promotion of culture and the arts within politics, and it is in the calls for scholarships and cultural execution where that place is decided, because it is there where creation, production, circulation of the work and artistic research are financed. Awards and Living Culture have their own logic, which deserves separate analysis. By focusing my gaze on these two calls, I can compare what is comparable and see clearly how politics treats, or mistreats, artistic endeavor. And what I saw in Minas, I say this bluntly, is a worrying example of how to poorly execute such an important policy. The feeling, given the design of these calls, is that Minas Gerais is not able to express today a public policy of culture and artistic research. Awards and Living Culture have their own logic, which deserves separate analysis. By focusing my gaze on these two calls, I can compare what is comparable and see clearly how politics treats, or mistreats, artistic endeavor. And what I saw in Minas, I say this bluntly, is a worrying example of how to poorly execute such an important policy. The feeling, given the design of these calls, is that Minas Gerais is not able to express today a public culture policy capable of organizing priorities, guaranteeing continuity and guiding promotion in a transparent, democratic and territorially balanced way. What appears instead of a structuring policy is a succession of fragmented, unequal and poorly articulated calls, which distribute resources without building a consistent project for the cultural development of the state.
It is also striking that the various categories aimed at artistic tours appear framed in the Call for Scholarships, in the scholarship modality, when, in practice, they involve production, movement of equipment, circulation of spectacle, articulation with spaces, communication and fulfillment of an extensive agenda public presentations.
Although the new Promotion Law admits the scholarship format for specific circulation actions, there is an important difference between supporting a training or dissemination action of a cultural agent, as provided for in the text of the law, and financing a tour, which is a complex and extended operation of artistic circulation.
The funnel of effective approval Let’s return to the two calls for promotion and start with architecture.
Minas took on an enormous diversity of languages, categories and ways of doing culture and compressed them into these two great calls.
Two narrow doors for an entire sector to pass through. The result of this concentration is a brutal funnel. In all of the more than eight thousand five hundred proposals evaluated in terms of merit, only 15.9% were effectively approved. The rest were divided between the unclassified and an immense line of more than five thousand five hundred “substitutes.” And here it is necessary to dispel an illusion: a substitute is not someone who has the possibility of being called later. The call for substitutes, when it occurs, is unsystematic, and in several calls for the first cycle in Minas there was simply no call at all. Being on the bench, in practice, usually means having been classified without receiving anything. In the Call for Scholarships, the effective approval rate fell to 8.6%, that is, of every hundred proposals, just over eight received resources. In the Call for Cultural Execution, the one for direct promotion, the effective approval rate was 19.2%, better than that of the scholarships, but still leaving out four out of every five proposals.
To understand the seriousness of this, it is necessary to know how the grade works. In the Call for Scholarships, the merit evaluation is worth up to 100 points, and bonuses are also added to that total, an extra score of up to 25 points granted to those who fall within affirmative actions, such as being a woman, LGBTQIAPN+ person, older adult, resident of a low HDI municipality or never before contemplated. That is, 100 is the full score of merit, and the best proposals, adding the bonuses, could reach 125. Well, even with a scale that goes so high, there were 629 projects in the line of substitutes that added 100 points or more, and 46 of them reached exactly 100 full points of merit, the perfect score in the evaluation of the project itself.
They are proposals that the State itself read, scored and recognized as excellent, among the best that registered, and that they were still left out, not because they had failed in anything, but because the places were sold out. The policy recognizes merit, but does not guarantee recourse. It certifies the quality, gives the artist a diploma of excellence and sends him home empty-handed.
A disturbing number is the enormous variation between the effective approval rates of the different transfer lines. When you go down from the general average to the details of each category, you discover that there are lines with effective approval close to 2% and others that are close to 100%, a difference that cannot be treated as a statistical detail. Audiovisual and New Media Circulation, for example, remained at 2.5%; the Production and Technical Exchange, by 2.9%; Circulation of Music Shows, by 5.3%; Circulation of Theater Shows, by 6.5%. In other lines, the rate was many times higher. It is not about opposing one area to another, nor about questioning the merit of any language or segment contemplated. What this gap reveals is a fragility of public planning: the distribution of places and resources does not seem to have been sufficiently guided by demand studies, reading of previous results, historical analysis of registrations and understanding of the specific needs of each field. A promotion policy of this scale cannot define its lines only by administrative distribution or by intuition; It needs to measure supply, demand, productive complexity and real attention capacity. The general average of 15.9%, in this context, is a statistical fiction: it hides deep differences between lines, masks obvious bottlenecks and prevents us from seeing where politics is, in fact, failing to respond to the demand that it itself called for.
Evaluation as roulette There is still a fragility at the root of the PNAB process in Minas Gerais. Each proposal, as I was able to verify, is evaluated by a single evaluator; and when there is an administrative appeal, it is that same adjudicator who decides again. A single person, alone, decides the obvious bottlenecks and prevents us from seeing where politics is, in fact, failing to respond to the demand that she herself called for.
Evaluation as roulette There is still a fragility at the root of the PNAB process in Minas Gerais. Each proposal, as I was able to verify, is evaluated by a single evaluator; and when there is an administrative appeal, it is that same adjudicator who decides again. A single person, alone, decides the fate of a project. It is difficult to defend as technically consistent a large-scale promotion process in which a proposal depends on a single reading, without a second evaluation, without a panel and without confrontation between divergent views. In calls in which I acted as an evaluator for other states and municipalities, each proposal went through several evaluators, and in many the highest and lowest grades were still discarded, precisely to dilute the weight of an isolated judgment. Not here. Here the chance of landing on the table of this or that evaluator can be worth more than the quality of the project. It is necessary to say this precisely, because I am an adjudicator myself and I know the complexity of that function closely. I have enormous respect for those who evaluate, almost always under great pressure, with short deadlines and unworthy remuneration, and it would be unfair to make the evaluator the scapegoat for a model that surpasses him. It is easy to blame the adjudicators, and not by chance, because they are the most visible and vulnerable part of the entire mechanism, the face that appears in the opinion when something goes wrong. But pointing towards them is confusing one of the most fragile links with the origin of the problem. The problem was never just the competence of the people, but the way in which they have been incorporated into the calls: without transparency in recruitment, without training, without a common methodology and, above all, with the isolation of those who decide alone. There are, yes, opinions of very low quality, and that needs to be said, but the underlying problem in Minas goes beyond the people: it is a design that gives a single hand a power that should be shared. When you add this fragile design to standardized, generic opinions, with signs of automation by AI and little adherence to the evaluated project, what you have is roulette. A survival competition disguised as a technical process. Hence the enormous outcry against the rulings. And what reaches the proponent, in the form of an opinion, often deepens the wound.
I want to make a small observation. I don’t think artificial intelligence is the villain here. Used well, and many referees and proponents use it well to organize ideas and shape a project or opinion, it is a legitimate tool. The problem is uncritical and unsupervised use, the opinion generated and delivered without a trained human formulating, reading, verifying and signing it. We run the risk of the most absurd of scenarios: projects written by machine on one side, evaluated by machine on the other, with cultural agents and flesh-and-blood artists awaiting the verdict of a conversation between two programs that no one supervised.
Should art and culture have the same criteria?
There is a deeper question here, which cannot be fully developed in this article, but which needs to at least be named: artistic processes have their own demands and cannot be evaluated only with the same generic yardstick applied to all cultural actions.
The difference between art and culture, between creation, language and invention, on the one hand, and transmission, memory and belonging, on the other, deserves a specific reflection, which I intend to develop in another text. For the purposes of this article, it is enough to retain a practical consequence: a policy that proposes to finance art needs to have instruments and criteria capable of evaluating the artistic consistency of the proposals, and not only their administrative adequacy, their payroll, their dissemination or their declared social impact.
This limitation has a documentary record in the evaluation criteria themselves. In the Call for Scholarships, the grade is divided into five criteria of twenty points each: coherence of the project, cultural relevance, community integration, trajectory of the agent and promotion of diversity. Let it be clear: the criticism does not fall on affirmative actions or on the promotion of diversity, but on the absence of a more complete yardstick to evaluate the artistic consistency of the proposals.
None of them asks the evaluator to judge the artistic power of the proposal, the inventiveness of the research in the language or the strength of the creation. In the Call for Cultural Execution, of the eighty points distributed among seven criteria, twelve correspond to the coherence of the budget sheet and twelve to the dissemination plan: thirty percent of the grade reserved for management instruments, while the artistic career of the proposer and the compatibility of the technical and artistic team together add up to twenty points. The ability to present a coherent budget and a communication strategy surpasses, numerically, everything that the form reserved to recognize who makes and who signs the project: a show, a film, an album are judged by the viability of the form, by the scope of the media plan, by the declared social impact, by everything that orbits the work, with little formal space for what makes it art.
There is yet another fundamental issue that the PNAB, as it is being executed, does not faces, and Minas is an example of this: professional art is not being structured. A serious cultural policy is not just about distributing sporadic aid, it is about building conditions so that those who make a living from art can continue living from art, with predictability, with scale, with a horizon. What I see, however, are small, pulverized values, designed more to relieve than to sustain. Scholarships and support that barely cover the cost of an assembly, a season, a festival, a continued creation process. A theater group that needs to remunerate actors, technicians, costumers, set designers, producers, and also maintain a headquarters, is not structured with a promotion that fits within the limit of a narrow and highly disputed line. Politics is treating art as a secondary job, as a supplement to income, as a specific gesture of relief. Not what it is: work, career, productive chain, living heritage of a country.
Structuring professional art requires compatible values, continuity between cycles and lines designed for the reality of those who produce at a high level. None of that is on the horizon of the current model.
The overlap between the entities and the cultural agents and artists also weighs on a confusion that borders on chaos: the overlap of calls between the federative entities. In the same year, sometimes in the same months, calls are opened by the Union, the states and the municipalities, each with its platform, its schedule, its rules, its annexes, its criteria and its quotas calculated in different ways. The artist, who should be creating, becomes a juggler of deadlines and forms, filling out parallel registrations, translating the same project into three different bureaucratic languages, trying to understand if he can accumulate support, running the risk of being disqualified in one call for a requirement that the other did not even require. This picture reveals a profound contradiction: although the country made progress in the creation of the National Culture System and in the idea of a federative, decentralized and concerted cultural policy, daily practice is still far from functioning as a system. Instead of the Union, State and Municipality talking, planning complementary calendars, harmonizing procedures and building an integrated development policy, what is often seen is an uncoordinated mosaic, in which each entity runs its process as if the others did not exist. The result is that the responsibility for the lack of institutional articulation ends up being transferred to the most fragile link in the chain: the cultural agent himself.
Decentralization, which should be a virtue of the PNAB, its ability to reach all corners of the country ends up turning against the cultural agent and artist himself, who finds himself alone in the face of a multiplication of calls that no one harmonized, in dispute for scarce resources.
Added to this lack of coordination is a concern. that circulates in the sector: the possibility that the federal resource is replacing, and not adding, the investments of states and municipalities.
We urgently need data and indicators on this.
Redesign the PNAB But I am not writing this text, almost venting, to bury the PNAB. I write it to save it.
The Aldir Blanc National Policy cannot continue to be executed as a haphazard succession of calls; It needs a profound requalification, a brave redesign at all levels of those who operate it. If the problem is budget, team and administrative structure, let that be said in every letter and faced as a political task, because there is a paradox in celebrating the PNAB as a historic investment in Brazilian culture while, in practice, thousands are left out and the approved values are too small to sustain processes, groups, spaces, festivals, works and trajectories that live up to the ambition that the policy itself announces. That is not the task of a single entity.
The federal government needs to assume the responsibility of coordinating, of harmonizing rules and platforms, of offering parameters that prevent each state and each municipality from reinventing the same crooked wheel alone. State governments need to stop treating the PNAB as a call counter and begin to build, from it, a true state policy for culture and the arts, structuring, continuous, that recognizes the specificities of the promotion of the arts and the other dimensions of culture, that evaluates with more than one look, that opens the recourse to an independent body, that clearly explains the grade, classification, substitution or rejection of each proposal. And the municipalities, which receive a significant part of the resources, need to stop being mere channelers of federal money to become formulators of their own cultural policies, rooted in their territory. Aldir Blanc promised something strange: a policy of continuous and capillary resources. What is missing now, at the height of this achievement, is to transform it from a machine for distributing calls into a robust, intelligent, perennial public policy. Today we have no predictability in the PNAB. Aldir Blanc was born from collective listening and a struggle of many hands. May those same hands now have the courage to redesign it, before wear and tear leads the sector to give up on what it fought so hard to conquer. Rethinking the PNAB is not dismantling it. It is to honor, with seriousness of management, its power.
For that to happen, it will be necessary, above all, a great effort of recognition. First, recognize and study the interesting models that a few states and municipalities are developing. And recognize that in many other places things are not good. That does not diminish the PNAB; On the contrary, it is the first serious gesture of those who want to preserve it. The Ministry of Culture, the states and the municipalities need to assume, together with the cultural and artistic sector, an urgent task of redesigning the policy, without fear of reviewing procedures, instruments, calendars, criteria, evaluation systems and, if necessary, even the division of resources between the entities and the law itself that instituted it. The PNAB cannot limit itself to carrying out formal rites, publishing calls and executing resources; It needs to stop subjecting the sector to a permanent competition of registrations, deadlines, platforms, documents and opinions, and start to clearly incorporate a structuring nature for culture and the arts in Brazil.
It is fair to recognize that some paths have begun to open: the accession of 12 states and seven capitals to the Aldir Blanc National Program of Support for Continued Actions shows that the idea of multi-year promotion is already beginning to appear as an important advance compared to the episodic logic of short-term calls. It will still be necessary to monitor its execution, evaluate its concrete results and expand its scope. But there is a decisive clue: the PNAB will only live up to its own history when it stops being just a factory of calls and is transformed into a structuring policy of permanence, continuity, federative coordination and real responsibility with the culture and art of this country.
* Marcelo Bones is an artist, theater director, cultural manager and researcher of public cultural policies. Founder of the Andante Theater Group and Andante – Gestão de Cultura, he is also the creator of the Festivals Observatory. He was director of Performing Arts at Funarte, consultant at MINC, director of FIT-BH, public manager in Belo Horizonte and Contagem, and acts as a consultant in cultural policies, artistic circulation, festivals and internationalization of the performing arts