Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how claims about the relationship between aesthetic, financial, and media values serve as evidence in the debate over whether Brazilian activist group Fora do Eixo democratizes culture through alternative finance or uses state cultural funds to gain political power.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses controversy around the Brazilian musico-political start-up Fora do Eixo and its modes of circulating, representing, and valuing bands. While the organization has become an important political actor in Brazil, it arose and grew by strategically mobilizing social networks to produce independent rock/pop music throughout the country's hinterlands. Closely mirroring the rhetoric of the PT government surrounding the uses of technologies to enact social inclusion, Fora do Eixo argues that it uses the internet and its organizational logics to democratize Brazilian music culture. Music production has served as a main generator of financial and political capital for the group, especially owing to the organization's internal currency, card, which performing musicians receive in lieu of legal tender. In its arguments that card, as a tool for resource distribution, improves the aesthetic and financial state of Brazilian independent music, Fora do Eixo makes contradictory claims about the relation between cultural movement, media visibility, and aesthetic worth. Fora do Eixo critics, meanwhile, see the group's use of card despite significant state cultural funding as a tool for accumulating resources and political status. Critics judge the bands Fora do Eixo promotes to have low aesthetic value, which then serves as evidence that the organization does not mobilize and produce culture so much as exploit musicians. This paper explores the differing modes of defining and relating social, economic and aesthetic values in this debate. It considers the political implications of each mode for treating culture as material and economy in Brazil and beyond.