Defending culture differently: methods for tomorrow

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This book, based on my regular posts on my website, is addressed to those who work daily in the French cultural sector and who, faced with the profound transformations underway, are questioning the paths to its renewal. Directors of cultural organizations, heads of cultural action in local authorities, mediators, project managers, artists engaged in participatory approaches, trainers, students in cultural policy: you will find here analyses and methods forged in the field, in confrontation with the multiple realities of cultural action, from my own subjective vantage point.

This book is also addressed to elected officials, mayors, deputy mayors for culture, departmental and regional councillors, members of parliament, who bear political responsibility for cultural choices in their territories. For to defend culture against budgetary arbitrations and challenges to its legitimacy, one must first be able to clearly articulate its democratic role. The following pages offer, I hope, keys to understanding and arguments grounded in experience to articulate, beyond conventional discourse, what culture concretely brings to the democratic life of a territory and why its public funding constitutes an investment in social cohesion and the emancipation of citizens.

This book is neither a theoretical manual nor a collection of recipes. It emerges from more than thirty years of multidisciplinary practice—artistic creation, professional training, cultural mediation, strategic support for institutions and local authorities—which have provided me with a privileged observatory, necessarily subjective, but anchored in the thickness of reality. From the first experiments in participatory cinema to the most recent digital initiatives, from supporting small associations to missions with major national institutions, my trajectory allows me, I hope, to draw an embodied understanding of the dynamics at work in the cultural sector.

The observation that underlies this work is widely shared: the French cultural sector is undergoing a profound crisis. This crisis cannot, in my view, be reduced to budgetary tensions, however real they may be. It touches on the very legitimacy of public cultural action, whose qualification as “non-essential” during the Covid-19 crisis revealed its great fragility, challenged as it is by the explosion of cultural practices via digital platforms, experiencing a crisis of meaning, and hampered by recurring difficulties in building cross-sectoral cooperation and honestly evaluating its own effects. The challenge, in my opinion, is no longer simply to defend what exists, but to rebuild the principles and methods of cultural action so that it regains its democratic relevance. And this is, I believe, the best thing one can do during a crisis.

For it is indeed democracy that is at stake. If I defend with conviction a cultural sector funded by taxpayers’ money, it is not out of corporatism, nor in defense of “creation” (which can very well exist free of any institutional framework), but because I am convinced that this sector carries possibilities for emancipation, for the development of freedoms and capacities for action that private actors, subject to the logic of profitability and attention capture, cannot offer in the same way. This conviction is not naive: it is accompanied by a demand for clear-sightedness about our own contradictions, about the systems of domination that we often perpetuate despite ourselves and unconsciously, and about the gap between our discourse and our practices.

This book therefore proposes a dual movement. First, a critical analysis of the current state of the sector: its history, its ideological foundations, its blind spots, its structural fragilities. Then, and above all, concrete methods for acting differently, for building authentic connections with audiences, for evaluating our actions with rigor and honesty, for genuinely cooperating between actors and across disciplines, for integrating digital transformations without losing our sovereignty, for reinventing our professional practices in light of cultural rights.

These methods are not “models” to be applied. They are tools to be adapted, proposals to be tested, paths to be explored according to the contexts and singularities of each territory, each socio-cultural environment, each team, each project. They have all been experimented with, refined, sometimes abandoned then taken up again in other forms. Their value lies precisely in this experimental grounding: they have proven themselves not in the abstraction of principles, but in the roughness of real situations.

The ambition of this book is both modest and ambitious: to contribute to making the French public cultural sector stronger tomorrow than it is today. Stronger not in the sense of a defensive retreat to protect existing achievements, but in the sense of a renewed capacity to fulfill its democratic mission: enabling everyone to exercise their cultural rights, to participate in the cultural life of the community, to contribute to the elaboration of our shared narratives. This sustainability requires, I believe, a fairly profound transformation of our ways of thinking and acting. It also requires the generous sharing of what works, in the hope that others will take it up, transform it, and enrich it.

My voice is personal, subjective, free, not bound to any institution or funding sources, and it can sometimes be partial. And it is precisely, it seems to me, the richness of our democratic organization to consider that disagreement and argumentation are productive of mutual enrichment, in respect for the diversity of cultures, experiences, and opinions. I do not believe that I am right, but I am convinced that we can mutually enrich one another through our situated knowledge.