Why Are Cultural Actors So Fragile?

From Arcadi in Île-de-France in 2018 to the Agence culturelle Grand Est in 2025, cultural agencies are disappearing into indifference. Beyond the observation, a reflection on the conditions for a sector’s resilience.

When Cultural Institutions Disappear Without a Trace

In 2018, Arcadi, the regional cultural agency of Île-de-France, which had existed for twenty-five years and provided considerable service to the dissemination and production of performing arts in the region, was closed by Valérie Pécresse, President of the Region. Arcadi was one of my partners at the time, particularly through the co-production of a research-action project on teenagers and cinemas. I witnessed how this major player disappeared without leaving a trace. What is striking about this disappearance, as with others, is the almost total indifference that accompanied it. The website was deleted very quickly. And today, apart from those who experienced it, there is virtually no accessible account attesting that this agency existed and was useful.

History repeats itself. In November 2024, the Agence culturelle Grand Est, an institution created nearly fifty years ago by Alsace and strengthened at the regional level after the territorial reform, learned that it would lose 60% of its regional subsidy from 2026. It was its president, Martine Lizola, who is also president of the Culture and Memory commission of the Regional Council, who announced this without any consultation, fully assuming this choice. As Joël Brouch, director of OARA, points out: « A few minutes are enough to weaken or eradicate a cultural actor. » This is very true. How can we understand this and act, and in what direction?

This decision is not part of an overall budget restriction to which cultural structures would also be subject. It is a genuine political choice about the place accorded to subsidized culture. The Grand Est Region has moreover limited the subsidy reduction to 10% for other structures in Alsace, Champagne, and Lorraine, presenting this reduction as “limited.” What may appear as cynicism is in reality a political choice that I believe is important to understand, in order to learn how to position ourselves, and I hope to move forward! But in a direction that will probably not please those who want to defend their small powers.

The Invisibility of Institutions in Citizens’ Eyes

Professional support is expressed on LinkedIn and at a few insular gatherings. These expressions of solidarity have strictly no effect. The decisions of elected officials prevail and cultural structures disappear according to political agendas. The question that arises is this: why does this type of institutional change leave citizens indifferent?

In principle, citizens should defend this type of agency. They should know what these structures bring them, support their maintenance, refuse to vote for candidates who threaten them. But the reality is quite different: most citizens are unaware that these institutions even exist. They therefore have no way of understanding what will be taken from them by their disappearance.

Furthermore, citizens’ cultural practices are massive, but they mainly go through digital platforms, the primary space for cultural consumption, and through private actors: major concerts, festivals, commercial events. Subsidized culture, though funded by their own taxes, and the institutional mechanisms that enable it to function, remain largely illegible to them. Insofar as they do not perceive its impact on themselves, it is logical that these cuts go unnoticed.

The small professional milieu complains, of course. But since citizens, who should be the first concerned, are not aware of what these cuts take from them, political leaders enjoy total impunity and freedom. We see here that cultural actors, who readily present themselves as leading social actors, are not really so—otherwise, they would be identified as such by citizens. Why?

Narrative as a Condition for Survival

Subsidized cultural structures live in almost complete dependence on political decisions. They are therefore in absolute fragility. Yet I am the first to think that these funding cuts harm citizens, even if this harm is not perceived as such. A harm that unfortunately affects mainly the wealthiest citizens, even though they are paradoxically not the ones who pay the most taxes.

Faced with this kind of problem, one must of course complain, be lucid, report on it. But above all, for still-existing institutions, there must be an awareness of a necessity: that of creating narrative. It is essential to tell citizens and politicians about the work of these institutional actors. For if there is no narrative of what they do and their social role—that is, the meaning of their funding by public money—neither elected officials nor citizens can understand what they are for. Only a guild understands their usefulness, whereas the purpose of public money is not to support the cultural sector guild: it is to serve citizens.

What was revealing in Arcadi’s case was the disappearance of the website, which contained all the narratives. There is significant political revisionism here. If “antifragile” narratives had existed—that is, narratives disseminated elsewhere than on the agency’s official website alone, partnerships with newspapers, real work on territorial storytelling—well, even after the Region closed the site, the political existence of this agency would have continued. All these narratives weave something together. Thus, it would have been more difficult to close it without almost anyone in the public noticing. But why are there so few public narratives of public institutions?

Antifragility as a Strategic Horizon

I advocate for the preservation of a strong and useful subsidized cultural sector in France, because it is, in my view, extremely precious for democracy. To achieve this, we must create and share narratives, and develop a pedagogy of the institution—that is, explain at all levels what institutions are for. Not in the form of a corporatist claim like “they’re going to close us down, help us,” but by making people understand how citizens, perhaps without knowing it themselves, are actually actors in these institutions.

This is how we can work on antifragility. To use Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept, developed in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), which I adapted to the cultural sector in the article For an Antifragility of Cultural Projects, it is about strengthening oneself through the attacks themselves. These attacks, instead of suffering them and complaining about them, must be considered as potential lessons, opportunities to learn, to grow, to develop new tools and increase our confidence.

But why is this approach not practiced more? Because, in the institutional layer cake, including that of cultural institutions, there are positions of power. The very opacity of institutions’ functions, in relation to one another, allows powers to be established, if only symbolic ones, of those who know what things are for versus the ignorant who do not. This logic of distinction through expert knowledge, which Pierre Bourdieu analyzed in Distinction (1979), also operates within the cultural sector itself. This is what must be opened to democracy.

Refounding the Democratic Meaning of Cultural Institutions

Refounding the democratic meaning of cultural institutions means opening them to their civic usefulness. It means opening them to understanding and to citizens themselves taking hold of tools that should belong to them. But since we are in models of power and domination, the professionals in place complain among themselves without having been ready, beforehand, to relinquish their power for the common good—that is, for the collective benefit that the organizations they lead could produce.

La Collaborative, a network of regional performing arts agencies, recalls in its statement of support for the Agence culturelle Grand Est in 2025 that these structures play « an essential role: supporting artistic teams and performance venues, supporting the circulation of works, advising local authorities, networking, resources, equipment and expertise in service of public policies ». But this role remains invisible to the general public. It is an entire ecosystem—“artists, structures, local authorities and inhabitants of territories”—that finds itself weakened without those most concerned being aware of it.

Let us learn from all this. Let us radically modify, from now on, the operating methods of territorial cultural institutions, whatever they may be, including artistic teams. Let us open them to citizens. Let us organize consultations. Let us rethink artistic spaces as contributive spaces and not as spaces of domination. Let us relinquish our powers. Having power over oneself as an individual, yes. Having power over a private structure that belongs to us, yes. But having power over a structure funded by public money, no, a thousand times no! This money is not meant to be placed in the hands of people who arrogate to themselves the power to operate it for us.

Toward an Effective Cultural Democracy

Why? Because these powers are the opposite of democracy. Democracy is dêmos kratos, power to the people. Everything that concerns the people, the decisions, the people must make them. One might object that citizens do not have the time, and that this is why we delegate, why we elect representatives and then let them act, trust them. But this delegation without oversight is not democracy. As Cornelius Castoriadis reminded us, « an autonomous society implies autonomous individuals » (1975).

We already have the possibility, within cultural institutions, to experiment with democratic processes. We have all the more freedom to do so because it is situated within an “artistic” framework where experimentation can be the norm. Let us do it. Let us refound democratic spaces in our cultural institutions. Let us cede power to citizens. And thus, we will strengthen our institutions, which will regain democratic power, independence from the powers in place, precisely because they will be re-anchored in democracy and not in dependence on political powers.

This refoundation requires moving from what French cultural policies have long called “cultural democratization”—a top-down transmission of legitimate culture to the people—to a true “cultural democracy,” where citizens are recognized as producers of culture and not only as recipients. It is on this condition that cultural institutions will cease to be fortresses vulnerable to political vagaries and become living spaces, anchored in the social fabric, capable of weathering storms because they will be supported by those they serve.