Art Policy in Iran and the Crisis of Historical Literacy: A Critical Reassessment of the Relationship between Collective Memory and Cultural Policy

Cultural and artistic policymaking at the macro level does not merely function as a mechanism of oversight and control; rather, it operates as a system of structural, largely invisible tracks that channel a society's developmental trajectory, its identity orientations, and its civilizational horizons. Within this framework, the institution of art and the broader system of aesthetic production are profoundly shaped by this policy geometry, to such an extent that any serious attempt to trace the structural challenges facing contemporary Iranian art inevitably leads back to a critical rereading of the contexts in which official decisions are made. One of the principal epistemic obstacles in analyzing this field, however, is the reduction of the nature of policy to a seemingly self-evident but effectively false dichotomy between "theory and practice," or "policy in principle versus action in practice." This distinction is commonly invoked to explain implementation failures by attributing them to an inherent separation between thought and action.

Rejecting this dualism, the present article argues that policy, in its essence, constitutes a coherent and continuous chain of concrete, objective decisions articulated around the shaping of a society's future, rather than a loose assemblage of disconnected declarations and gestures. The central problem of the research is to account for the "structural incongruity" and "historical asynchrony" between the abstract propositions embedded in upstream art-policy documents, on the one hand, and the actual, lived context of society, on the other. The article's hypothesis is that the missing link, and the principal factor underlying this deep rupture, is the systematic absence or weakening of a foundational component in the processes of policy formulation and implementation.

The aim of this research is to analyze the relationship between contemporary Iranian art policy and the level of historical literacy among both policymaking elites and the general public, and to propose strategies for reconnecting the institution of art with historical memory. The theoretical framework of the study is grounded in Alain Touraine's reading of society, culture, and history, according to which cultural policy should be understood not as a mere set of administrative regulations and governmental decisions, but as a field of contestation among social actors striving to define, in a legitimate way, the meaning, identity, and future of their society. This framework is integrated with the concept of historical literacy, understood here as a critical capacity that enables a dialectical understanding of the connections among past, present, and future and that functions as the structural interface between collective memory and national identity, as well as with Halbwachs's and Assmann's theorization of collective memory. In the age of globalization and the emergence of network-based configurations of social relations, the absence or weakening of historical literacy within the apparatus of art policy is shown to produce three fundamental consequences: (a) an anachronism in official documents, disconnecting them from the concrete concerns of the present; (b) the formalization of supportive policies, distancing them from the actual needs of the art field; and (c) the emergence of cultural alienation within the body of society. Accordingly, a critical examination of this asynchrony is treated as a vital precondition for the epistemic and practical reconstruction of art policy in Iran.

Methodologically, the study adopts a library-based, qualitative approach, combining content analysis of official art-policy documents, relevant theoretical literature, and findings from a field survey measuring the level of historical literacy among residents of Tehran. Sources were analyzed through qualitative, categorized content analysis, with particular attention to extracting key concepts, identifying latent themes within policy discourse, and examining how official policies engage with history and cultural identity, using Touraine's theoretical framework as the basis for this categorization.

The key findings indicate that this rupture between policy and social reality is reproduced at five interrelated levels: first, the reduction of history to a monophonic and instrumentalized narrative; second, the dominance of rote memorization over genuine historical thinking within the education system; third, the static and time-blind character of policy documents, which remain disconnected from evolving social realities; fourth, the monopolization of collective memory by official discourse, which marginalizes alternative and popular narratives of the past; and fifth, a persistent failure to harness digital technologies for the reconstruction and democratization of memory. The study further proposes a "cyclical model of artistic memory" to capture the dynamic relationship among artistic production, collective memory, and cultural policy, tracing how lived historical experience is transformed into artistic narrative, filtered through official and unofficial institutions, sedimented into collective memory, and ultimately fed back into subsequent policy decisions.

The study concludes that these five levels, although appearing as distinct problems, in fact stem from a single underlying root: the absence of historical literacy as the epistemic infrastructure of art policy. Where policymakers lack this capacity, history functions not as a living resource for dialogue but as an instrument for legitimizing predetermined decisions. On this basis, the study argues that repairing this rupture requires three interconnected measures: a shift from an imposed, monophonic narrative toward a polyphonic dialogue with history; the redefinition of historical literacy as an educational skill to be cultivated alongside factual content knowledge; and the mobilization of digital capacities to release collective memory from the monopoly of official institutions. Ultimately, the study contends that sustainable cultural development is not possible without historical literacy: a society unable to interpret its own past cannot be expected to construct an independent future.