Every year, Fundación Alternativas publishes the Report on the State of Culture in Spain. We understand that this subject deserves an indepth study, as it is related to the idea of beauty, without which it would be very difficult to live and coexist. Frank Wilczec, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, asks whether the world embodies beautiful ideas, whether the world is a work of art, like music, painting or sculpture, or science. 

We can well integrate all these realities into what we call culture, the set of ideas or knowledge acquired through the development of the intellectual faculties. Also, ways of life, as defined by UNESCO. 

If we look at culture from a creative or productive perspective, it is possible to call it a cultural industry. Fundación Alternativas holds a regular Cultural Industries Forum because this is the priority approach to culture that we believe should be developed within a think tank. This is the essential focus of Fundación Alternativas’ annual reports. 

Culture has an inextricable relationship with individual and social well-being. It is difficult to quantify, but recent studies carried out in British museums show the economic—though surely not conscious—benefit of consuming cultural goods. 

It is precisely through culture and its ability to go beyond the subjective sphere and the national environment that contemporary thought transcends the merely individualistic Enlightenment. 

^{This project is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sports through the General Directorate of Books and Promotion of Reading.}