Is Culture Serving the Public?

Do the 4 billion euros of the national culture budget truly serve the general interest? This question deserves to be asked pointedly, as budget cuts continue to accumulate. On the ground, committed professionals who have long been asking this question often feel as though they are swimming against the current.

Cultural rights as the foundation of a democratic policy
Culture, in its anthropological sense, is what defines us as individuals. Our culture must be respected, because this is how our dignity is respected. Cultural rights, founded on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, postulate this essential recognition. As Patrice Meyer-Bisch writes in Les droits culturels (2010), « culture is not a mere bonus for the soul, but rather the very condition for recognizing human dignity ».

Culture is always both personal and collective. It is what creates bonds, what defines us, what gives us existence. It permeates every aspect of our daily lives, including how we eat, for example. In the West, incidentally, the relationship with food is often pathological: most people claim that indulging themselves means consuming things that harm them. This unhealthy culinary culture reflects a more general relationship with our cultural practices.

As a cultural professional, I am particularly interested in state-subsidized culture, in the portion of tax revenue allocated to cultural spending. Theater, cinema, music, museums, libraries: we try to put culture everywhere, with the 1% cultural allocation in building construction, for instance. The intention seems excellent. But do these 4 billion euros of the national Ministry of Culture budget, along with local funding from cities, departments, regions, and metropolitan communities, truly serve the public that finances them—that is, all the citizens who pay mandatory taxes?

A 4 billion euro budget for what kind of culture?

The 2026 finance bill announces a 216 million euro cut for the Ministry of Culture, bringing state funding for culture down to 4.2 billion euros. This reduction affects all sectors: artistic creation, heritage, the Pass Culture, and public broadcasting. For the first time in over a decade, support for artistic creation is not being preserved, with a 34 million euro decline. The regional cultural affairs directorates (DRAC) are seeing their resources diminish, thus limiting their capacity to support cultural actors across the territory.

Is this culture, paid for by the taxes of all citizens, truly equal to the cultural challenges I described? Is it equal to the task of creating bonds between human beings that we ask of it? Who are the audiences of subsidized theaters? Who are these cultural offerings aimed at—offerings that are predominantly white, predominantly male, and predominantly, even for works created by people whose names suggest their families were of immigrant origin, directly colonialist, if not neocolonialist?

These works very often assume that their objective is to bring “jam to pigs,” to bring “good things” to elevate the cultural consumption deemed bad on the part of “audiences,” often from working-class backgrounds, without even having taken the time to get to know them. Our condescension is such that our interlocutors, the “audiences,” are quite right to show no interest in our offerings. And yet they are the ones paying for them. Pierre Bourdieu analyzed as early as 1979 in La Distinction that cultural tastes function as markers of social class, serving to legitimize and reproduce social hierarchies. This is quite unfortunate, because it is not the stated goal. What could be done differently?

Mechanisms of social reproduction

Within schools, children are more or less all obligated to attend performances or films they did not choose, and for which they are extremely poorly prepared, most often not at all. This is not the teachers’ fault: they no longer have training time during their working hours. Training sessions take place during their vacation time... Those who are open-minded enough to take their students to cultural venues hope it might open some doors, and it does open a few. But these will always be exceptions that prove the rule, because overall it produces closures. How can one appreciate what one is forced to see, which is foreign to one’s culture, without having been accompanied at all?

This situation clearly shows that subsidized culture constitutes a very well-organized mechanism of bourgeois reproduction that excludes those who do not appreciate it from the outset. As Emmanuel de Waresquiel wrote in Malaise dans l’inculture (2013), « cultural democratization has too often turned into the reproduction of elites under the guise of universalism ».

It is worth recalling here an often obscured historical truth: since Louis XIV, artistic creation in France has been structurally in service to power. It contributes to the prestige of the State, to the legitimization of those who govern. Discourses on citizen emancipation through culture are often rhetorical dressings for a policy that primarily aims to consolidate power through the prestige of artistic productions. This can be seen in architecture. I do not mean that there are no sincere professionals and generous artists in this system—quite the contrary. But the very structure of French cultural policy remains marked by this function of distinction, reproduction, and power.

At the opposite end, there can be “popular” shows, extremely low-brow, highly demagogic, that elevate no one. There are of course other approaches to accessible art: art in public spaces, street theater festivals, for example. But who attends them, who are they aimed at? And who notices that this sculpture that appeared in the street has something to offer them in terms of aesthetic experience? Cultural projects develop in working-class areas, but who participates, how do artists position themselves? Do they truly engage with people, and in what way? Because very often, since these are cultural and artistic projects, artists are asked to have a “real project,” as funding applications require.

If there is no “real project”—that is, something imposed on populations—then it is not funded. If we co-created, if we made space for encounter and the project was invented with the inhabitants, it would not be funded by culture budgets, because it would then be considered cultural action, popular education, not of high cultural level, not real artistic projects, simply not in the realm of creation. I know the subject well: to implement as much as possible, in my own artistic and cultural activities, participatory projects, artistic projects based on sensitive encounter that are invented through that encounter, I have had to learn to navigate this contradictory system.

The trap of private foundations and the diversion of cultural rights

To obtain funding, while we are engaged in projects that fully respect the letter of cultural rights—this approach inscribed in French law that recognizes everyone’s right to participate in the cultural life of their choice—we must revert to a logic of democratization, to a fake artistic project that, of course, we will not follow, but that will reassure cultural institutions structured around domination. Subsidized culture is not in service to the public; it is in service to the domination of the public. If we want to serve the public, we must pretend to dominate in order to be funded. A choreographer, for example, who experiences her artistic approach through direct encounter with inhabitants, finds herself obligated to create “grand performances” on theater stages, so that her grassroots cultural actions can be funded. Without her stage performances, she would lose her legitimacy as an artist, even though she is fully an artist, and perhaps even more so, in the co-creations she does elsewhere than on “major stages.”

There is a great paradox: today, holding a truly democratic discourse on culture is perceived as radical. Defending cultural rights—that is, the right of everyone to have their culture recognized and to actively participate in cultural life—should constitute a shared common ground in a Republic. Yet it is seen as a marginal, almost subversive stance. Professionals who uphold these values often feel they are going against the current, fighting against windmills. They defend elementary republican principles and find themselves treated as utopians, troublemakers, non-artists.

There are also private cultural institutions, such as the Cartier, Vuitton, or Pinault foundations. But what are we defending when we go to see works or exhibitions in such places? In France, the system differs from that of the United States, where culture receives very little public subsidy but is supported by wealthy patrons who decide to defend the arts. The American system is more honest in a way: the reproduction of domination is clearly assumed.

In France, we legitimize these foundations, we appreciate their artistic and cultural work. They may even have, with great sincerity, the desire to carry out social projects, sometimes even better serving the public than projects subsidized by public money itself. But all of this remains extremely perverse. Culture then becomes nothing more than a form of bourgeois do-goodism that gives alms to the poor, not by giving them money, but by convincing itself it is giving them moments of personal expression. Is this what it means to serve the public as culture?

Some might say there are the MJCs (youth and cultural centers), that there are many social spaces in neighborhoods that offer cultural projects. This is true, and I am in favor of defending them. I am in favor of training artists and legitimizing artists to have experiences in neighborhoods, whether working-class or not. It is not only working-class neighborhoods that should be targeted.

For a culture rooted in territories

I have collaborated with artists who worked for years in working-class neighborhoods with great difficulty regarding their public support. They had a genuine desire for their art and culture to serve the public, but to maintain this truly public service, they had to beg with great difficulty each time for scraps of budget, because they were not creating “grand performances” in parallel. This type of project rooted in a territory should be what we support most, what we legitimize most.

These committed professionals carry magnificent values. They are often alone or nearly so, isolated, questioning the meaning of what they do and wondering how they might be legitimized. When they dare to voice these questions, they encounter incomprehension, even hostility. There are, in this sector, profoundly honest people trying to implement a truly democratic culture, who find themselves marginalized by a system that operates on different logics. This solitude is exhausting. It generates the feeling of fighting against windmills, of preaching in the desert. Yet when these professionals meet, exchange, share their difficulties, they find in this solidarity the strength to continue.

These projects deserve sustained support because they are durably rooted. They are much richer, much deeper, much more constructive than a subsidized theater that costs 3 million euros per year for a few bourgeois who come to see the shows, so that three or four times a year some passersby can watch this elite enjoy themselves. And all this money for that? Faced with the announced budget cuts—58 million euros less for heritage, 40 million euros less for artistic creation—the question arises even more acutely: how is public money being used?

One might object that artistic creation has diversified. This is an illusion. The same aesthetics dominate, the same networks of legitimization function, the same insular circles reproduce themselves. Certain artists, by constantly demanding to be defended without ever questioning their own social responsibility, end up harming the entire sector. They make themselves insufferable through their victim posture, through their discourse of “defending artistic freedom,” all while benefiting from substantial funding. They defend only their privileges of cultural domination in service to power. They thus contribute, often unwittingly, to delegitimizing public cultural spending in the eyes of citizens. This is what might be called “handing over the stick to be beaten with”: their attitude justifies the harshest criticisms against the cultural sector, to the detriment of all those who sincerely work in service to the public.

I am therefore in favor of fostering modest, lasting engagements of artists in neighborhoods, in territories, supported for the art as experience they offer. Supported also with mentors to ensure a level of artistic excellence. This approach echoes what Augusto Boal defended in his Theatre of the Oppressed (1974): making the spectator no longer a passive consumer, but an actor in their own cultural emancipation.

Let us release the large budgets devoted to bourgeois reproduction. Let us release the major expenditures that do not serve the public. The ministry itself recognizes in its “Better Production, Better Distribution” plan, which will receive 15 million euros in 2026, the need to rethink modes of production and distribution. But this plan is very timid. We need to go much further and radically question what we mean by “public service of culture.” Because if the 4 billion euros of the budget only serve to reproduce existing social hierarchies, what do they really serve?

To all those who, in this sector, carry these democratic values with conviction, often in solitude and incomprehension, it must be said that this fight is worth it. Defending the idea that public money should serve the public, that culture financed by all should benefit all, that cultural rights are fundamental rights: this is defending the Republic itself. And even if one sometimes feels like fighting against windmills, it is in the sharing of these convictions, in the solidarity among committed professionals, that the strength to continue is found, and that culture can become a true living laboratory of democracy.