The Svenska Dagbladet of Sweden has decided to reduce the pages dedicated to literature and turn the culture section into a section dedicated to “lifestyles”, that is, to fill those trendy pages, tips for decorating the house and recommendations for travelling.

The decision provoked the anger of the literary critic and now unemployed Lars Lönnroth, who denounced that “culture has become a luxury”, as he believes that the directors of the newspapers have opened the sales all year round in the intellectual field (article that can be read in French and Spanish on the URL0 website).

Little again. “2000. Around the year 2000, the real decline of the cultural pages began and then it was imposed, using approximately the same modus operandi, on all the major journals, when readers began to interrupt the subscriptions of the paper periodicals to read them free on the Internet.” In Euskal Herria, accounts have long been as cold as in Sweden; take the newspaper, anybody, and say where the department of culture is, at first, in the middle, at the end; how many pages it has; and what content it has. How many analyses, debate, criticism, in a word, depth. How much propaganda, antipathy to the arts, so much vanity?

Lönnroth warned at the end of the article that this frivolity option also has risks: “The schooled bourgeoisie has so far been a loyal audience and has begun to interrupt subscriptions. (…) The most demanding readers of the university environment will also use more intellectual journals.”

I do not know if that will be the case. What I know is that I am less and less interested in the culture pages of newspapers and that, on the contrary, I increasingly turn to the publications and web pages that offer me criticism, opinion and analysis.