Creative Freedom and Cultural Rights
French cultural policy today finds itself at the crossroads of two fundamental principles, both enshrined in law: creative freedom and cultural rights, which everything seems to oppose. How can they be reconciled?
Two pillars
Creative freedom, strongly reaffirmed by the 2016 law on creative freedom, architecture and heritage (LCAP), protects the artistic act as a pillar of democracy. Cultural rights, which are intended to increasingly permeate public policies, promote the right of each person, alone or in community, to participate in cultural life and express their humanity; it is cited in the same law, as well as in the NOTRe law of 2015.
At first glance, these two logics may seem to oppose each other. One defends the artist, their uniqueness, their right to excess, to provocation, even to scandal. The other defends the person, the community, their right to recognition, to respect for their identity and heritage. However, an in-depth analysis reveals less an opposition than a rich and fertile dialectic, whose proper articulation is, in my view, one of the keys to contemporary cultural policies.
Two seemingly opposing logics
Creative freedom, as presented in the Legal and Practical Guide of the Ministry of Culture (2025), is a right that protects the artist in their approach of “transformation and deformation of reality”. It is an emanation of freedom of expression, but with a specificity: it protects “the legitimate insolence or provocation inherent in certain artistic approaches”. It is a right to “hurt, shock or disturb”, essential to the vitality of democratic debate. This freedom is not absolute, however; it is framed by law and must be reconciled with the protection of public order, human dignity and the rights of others. The logic is that of protecting an individual right, that of the creator, against potential obstacles, whether institutional or social.
Cultural rights adopt a different perspective. They are cited thus in the LCAP law of 2016, and almost in the same way in the NOTRe law of 2015: “The State, through its central and decentralized services, territorial communities and their groupings as well as their public establishments define and implement, in respect of cultural rights set out by the UNESCO convention of October 20, 2005.” They are not defined there, what is authoritative being the Fribourg Declaration (2007). They do not focus on the work or its author, but on people and communities as actors of their own culture. Their main issue is to fight against “forms of assignment and discrimination”, to allow everyone to “choose and see their cultural identity respected” and to “participate in the development, implementation and evaluation of decisions that concern them”. The logic here is collective, participatory and relational. It aims to “cultivate the commons” and ensure that public action does not reinforce clichés or top-down postures.
A point of friction clearly appears: what happens when an artist’s creative freedom directly clashes with a community’s cultural rights to see their identity respected, for example? Or when a group’s participatory claim is perceived by a creator as an attack on their artistic autonomy? This is where the dialectic must be engaged.
Beyond opposition: a founding complementarity
Rather than seeing them as antagonistic forces, it is more accurate to consider creative freedom and cultural rights as two faces of the same emancipation project:
- Creative freedom nourishes cultural rights. Without free, diverse and sometimes disturbing artistic creation, the “cultural resources” that people can mobilize to build themselves would be impoverished. A creation that would only reflect existing norms would not allow to “deconstruct clichés” or “develop critical thinking”, central objectives of cultural rights. The artist who, using their freedom, denounces colonialism or questions relations of domination, offers society essential symbolic tools so that communities can reappropriate their history and debate their present.
- Cultural rights give meaning and scope to creative freedom. A work, even the most radical, only exists fully in its reception and appropriation by society. By favoring participation, diversity of interpretations and everyone’s ability to “express their feelings”, cultural rights create the conditions for a rich and complex dialogue around works. They transform the audience from a simple “consumer” into an active and thinking community. The work is no longer just an object to contemplate, but a catalyst for debate, social bonding and the construction of common meaning.
The tension between the two principles is therefore not a defect, but an engine. It requires constant adjustment, constant negotiation between one person’s right to speak and another’s right to be respected, between artistic innovation and social cohesion.
Suggestions for a dialectical cultural policy
To translate this dialectic into concrete actions, several avenues can be explored, both at the level of public policies and field practices.
- For cultural policies and public funders:
- Support both risk and connection: Public funding should not oppose support for avant-garde creation (creative freedom) and support for territorial projects (cultural rights). It is about encouraging projects that articulate both: artists who take risks by immersing themselves in a social context, participatory approaches that aim for artistic excellence. Evaluation must go beyond mere attendance criteria to value the quality of social bonding created and the artistic innovation allowed.
- Integrate the dialectic into public commissioning: The “1% artistic” system or any other public commission should integrate this double requirement. The specifications can leave great freedom to the artist while providing for a process of dialogue and mediation with future users of the place, not to dictate the form of the work, but to share its meaning and cultivate participation processes in art, which are in no way opposed to creative freedom, contrary to what we might hear.
- Train for controversy management: Public authorities must equip cultural actors to manage tensions. Rather than giving in to pressure by deprogramming a work, it is about knowing how to organize debate, set up mediation and rely on the legal framework that protects creation while sanctioning real abuses (incitement to hatred, etc.).
- For institutions and cultural field actors:
- Reinvent mediation as intermediation: Mediation should not be a top-down explanation of the work, but an “intermediation” that favors “reciprocal sharing”. Faced with a provocative work, the mediator’s role is not to justify the artist but to provide reading keys, to contextualize the approach, and above all to create a secure space where disagreements and emotions can be expressed and discussed, based on “diversity of viewpoints”.
- Articulate programming and participation: The “freedom of programming”, dear to institution directors, can be enriched with a participatory dimension. It is not about submitting programming to vote, but about establishing user committees, dialogue times or “speaking and debate groups” that allow nourishing the programmer’s reflection and preparing the public for audacious proposals.
- Make reception a political act: A successful reception, in the sense of cultural rights, is one that recognizes the singularity of each person. Faced with a divisive work, the quality of reception, available information, and human presence for dialogue can transform a potentially violent experience into a moment of reflection and constructive exchange.
To conclude, I would say that creative freedom and cultural rights are not two parallel worlds but the two lungs of the cultural democracy I wish for. One ensures inspiration, the supply of fresh and sometimes pungent air. The other ensures expiration, the transformation of this air into speech, into connection, into collective life. A cultural policy that neglects one in favor of the other is an asthmatic policy! The real ambition in my view is to cultivate their fertile tension, by firmly defending the artist’s right to be free, while giving each citizen the means to fully participate in the infinite conversation that is culture.
The “cultural rights”, which derive from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a concept developed and defended by researchers, sociologists, philosophers, political leaders and actors of the cultural world. Present in a certain number of articles of law since 2001, the cultural rights aim at highlighting and formalizing, in order to be able to make them operative, the principles of a “cultural democracy”. To summarize it quickly, it is a question of each person being able to give value to his or her personal culture, in order to be able to exercise his or her citizenship: to express himself or herself, to defend his or her point of view, to create, to develop his or her practices, to have access to a cultural diversity, etc. Cultural rights operate in a much wider field than that of the strict cultural sector.
The notion of “cultural rights” is present in France in the laws NOTRe (2015) and LCAP (2016). It is carried by a delegation of the Ministry of Culture (General Delegation for transmission, territories, since January 1, 2021).
Paradoxically, cultural rights are difficult to implement in the cultural sector, which is traditionally rather attached to “cultural democratization”: one often defends the idea of the transmission to the public of works of art of the best possible quality, according to a principle of hierarchy of “cultural values”. Thus, the cultural rights can be lived by certain professionals of the culture as a dangerous dynamics for the Art, a tendency towards the amateur practices, which is not the case.
In my point of view, which is that of a practitioner/researcher in the cultural field, cultural rights are above all a practice, an exercise of democracy in the very methods of organization of the work, of the relation to the other and of the place of each one, the choices of programming, the methods of mediation and animation of workshops, the mode of territorial inscription of the cultural policy, etc.
I propose in this section concrete working methods for good practices of implementation of cultural rights, based on my field experiences, as well as a sharing of more theoretical reflections, in the framework of my own research on cultural rights.
I place myself in the filiation of thinkers like John Dewey. But cultural rights cannot be presented without mentioning Patrice Meyer-Bisch, Jean-Michel Lucas, Christelle Blouët, the “Fribourg Declaration”, etc.
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