The False Public-Private Debate in the Cultural Sector

The rhetoric of scarcity masks deliberate political choices. Deconstructing the false public-private debate allows us to think differently about the place of cultural actors in the contemporary ecosystem.

The Myth of Scarcity: A Political Lie

Since the doubling of the Ministry of Culture’s budget in 1982, the subsidised cultural sector has undergone several phases of questioning. Repeated attacks on the status of intermittent entertainment workers, followed by recurring discourse on cuts to public funding, have established a rhetoric of scarcity that has become almost natural. “We no longer have money,” “we no longer have the means we once had”: this narrative is so widespread that it seems self-evident. Yet it is a lie. But why? We can clearly see cultural budgets declining!

There is no less tax collection today than yesterday—quite the contrary. What has changed are the methods of collection, their territorialisation, and their distribution, with an increased tendency toward centralisation. A city, department, or region may indeed have a smaller budget than before. But these local authorities continue to manage substantial budgets and make trade-offs. Certain items remain priorities: everything depends on the symbolic value accorded to each domain, in other words, the importance it is granted.

The example of the city of Le Havre is illuminating. This city, whose mayor, then Prime Minister, was among those who declared culture “non-essential” during the Covid crisis, nevertheless devotes 16% of its municipal budget to culture—an exceptionally rare proportion in France. This is a choice, a deliberate trade-off. To consider as objective fact that “there is no more money” amounts to taking a political narrative at face value. What should be said honestly is: “we are choosing to devote fewer resources to culture.” Admittedly, the abolition of levies such as the housing tax has reduced local authorities’ tax revenues. But having less does not mean ceasing to choose.

The Illusion of the Public-Private Opposition

Furthermore, we often hear laments about the arrival of new private actors in the cultural sector, who supposedly compete with public institutions and “artist collectives.” Fabrice Raffin, in a recent article on public-private hybridisation in culture, describes this recomposition: companies like Quai 36 or Caravaggio now intervene in street arts and participatory projects, while groups like Live Nation or Vivendi are transforming the festival sector (“Public-Private Hybridisation in Culture: Risks of Blurring”, La Gazette des communes, 17 November 2025). This analysis, while pertinent descriptively, nevertheless deserves nuance on one fundamental point: the very concept of “artist collective” contains an ambiguity that needs clarification. Indeed, to receive public subsidies, French tradition requires going through a legal structure, most often an association. Yet associations are not public services: they are private law entities. The vast majority of performing arts companies are associations, whose artist-directors are paid through the intermittent entertainment worker status. This configuration, pseudo-legal but widespread, constitutes a form of legal fiction: these associations often have no members in the proper sense, even though this is the very foundation of associative status. Their operation is not associative but entrepreneurial.

In other words, public subsidies paid to “artist collectives” have always been intended for private law entities. If today new actors—event agencies, cultural marketing structures—propose different projects, more connected to digital technology or territorial action, this is not a shift from public to private. This shift is illusory: there was never really any “public” in the strict sense. What is changing are the expectations of elected officials, cultural managers, and audiences themselves.

An Anthropological Change, Not a Structural One

What we are observing, therefore, is not a structural mutation of the cultural sector, but an anthropological transformation of what we expect from subsidised culture. Fabrice Raffin rightly points to the tensions between the “short time of communication” and the “long time of mediation.” Private operators would favour punctual and spectacular interventions where subsidised companies developed long-term projects, accompanied by mediation and co-construction with residents.

This criticism is valid, even if artistic teams often carry out equally punctual cultural actions, but it must not obscure a deeper evolution: contemporary cultural projects are often more collective than before, less identified with a single author and more carried by teams, without an identified artist. We are moving from a model centred on the overestimated (and sometimes brutal) figure of the director—let us cite Bartabas as an emblematic example of this modality—to collectives where no prominent name validates that it is “art.” This is precisely where the change lies: not in the legal structure, but in our conception of what constitutes a work, which is opening up.

Michel Schneider, in La Comédie de la culture (1993), described very well the role-play between the institution that legitimises itself through artists and artists who legitimise themselves through the institution. Artistic quality, “good” or “bad,” was really not the issue; what mattered was occupying a social function through mutual validation. This system is now in transition. We deplore it by invoking “privatisation” or the lack of artistic ambition of new actors, when it is perhaps a salutary questioning of the symbolic domination exercised by certain consecrated figures.

The Political Function of Support for Creation

Why has public authority historically supported artistic creation? For the beauty of the gesture? For the defence of a utopian cultural diversity? How naive are those who believe that political choices are free from calculation, even if unconscious. We support what serves our project, or the values we defend. If certain elected officials wish to defend cultural diversity, it is because their political project integrates this dimension; they find in it a legitimacy consistent with the values they uphold.

I am not saying that political leaders would only have values through electoral strategy. They can be entirely sincere. But what they support, they support to defend their political project—this is a sociological reality that must be faced squarely. For a long time, from Louis XIV until about forty years ago, artistic creation funded by public money was part and parcel of political power; it constituted one of its symbolic attributes.

This is no longer the case. The symbols of power now lie rather in financial circles, and the symbolic capital of art no longer directly benefits those who govern. Consequently, political leaders no longer have an obvious strategic interest in supporting culture for its own sake. They need cultural projects to be directly useful. Mere “support for creation” is no longer sufficient, because its historical raison d’être (symbolically underpinning power) has vanished. As Fabrice Raffin notes, elected officials now seek “quick and measurable” results, a communicable “cultural performance.” This shift is not a betrayal: it is the logical consequence of a disconnection between culture and power. And this is perhaps, at bottom, good news for culture supported by public money, which will finally be able to envision itself as a stakeholder in democracy, rather than a mere ornament of power.

Social Utility: A Legitimate Requirement

When artists complain that culture is being “instrumentalised” and demand support for art “as such,” they do not realise that public authorities have never supported art as such! They have always supported art because it served political prestige. An artist who receives subsidies for a residency may feel recognised for the quality of their work. They do not always realise that they are the instrument of a system, even if, concretely, they are indeed supported to create.

The real debate is not about the legal origin of funding, but about its purposes. Public money is not market money: it is money for social utility. If financial resources come from public collection, the culture funded must have social utility; otherwise, this expenditure has no republican meaning. Private money, for its part, responds to other logics: profitability, tax relief, patronage, foundations, etc. These logics can also aim at projects of social utility, but not necessarily. There is no hierarchy to establish between the two; what matters is clarity about objectives.

The current confusion stems precisely from this blurring. We no longer know whether a museum is public or private, especially when companies display their logos prominently on the walls of public institutions while the State’s logo remains discreet. This opacity, which Fabrice Raffin also highlights, does not help citizens understand the stakes. A company director quoted in his article summarises the problem: the opacity of private operators’ economic models when they mobilise public funds fuels distrust.

Toward Cultural Democracy

Heritage support and support for creation have long relied on the concept of cultural democratisation: disseminating to the greatest number works legitimised by the art market or by institutions. We preserve and acquire what has market value to enrich public collections. But the collective cultural heritage in the broader sense—that which concerns citizens in their diversity—remains little collected and little valued. This is, in my view, a major gap.

Public cultural actors should open up more to a democratic culture, distinct from cultural democratisation. The former starts from the practices and expressions of citizens themselves; the latter consists of transmitting to them what has been previously consecrated. We can leave “great works” to private actors if we consider that what is essential for the Republic is to restore meaning to everyone’s place, to democracy itself. The Centre Pompidou, at its opening in 1977, embodied this ambition of openness. The 104 in Paris continues this logic today: places that conceive of culture as a democratic space and not as a space of domination.

I therefore invite us always to specify where the money comes from and what political project it serves. This question concerns elected officials, but also cultural actors and citizens, who must be better informed about the institutional framework of the proposals made to them. Thus we can move beyond the discourse of scarcity to understand what we fund, why we fund it, and learn to situate ourselves in a changing ecosystem. This is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to work with, and within which we must all know how to position ourselves.

The Urgency of Cultural Narratives

Cultural narratives are indispensable for present and future elected officials if we want culture to play a democratic role. If we do not narrate them, what will we see emerge? Projects supposedly “socially useful” but weak in artistic rigour, perhaps demagogic. On the other hand, if we question our own practices in terms of their social utility, we can help this sector reinvent a creative vitality. We are its main actors, because elected officials need us, our actions, our evaluations, and the narratives we make of artistic processes.

I advocate for an artistic vitality that is both civic and demanding. Demanding also in the value of the bonds woven. Funded at its fair value and with respect above all for those who are its funders and beneficiaries: the citizens.