Rethinking youth culture

Cultural institutions often fail to reach youth. To reverse this trend, we must move from cultural democratization to cultural democracy, recognizing the diversity of practices.

The Eternal Misunderstanding

It is striking to note that Hesiod, in 720 BCE, was already lamenting an “unbearable, unrestrained, simply terrible” youth. Socrates continued two centuries later by calling children “tyrants.” This millennial permanence of adult discourse on the supposed decadence of youth should alert us: the problem is not youth but our structural inability to understand and respect them in their diversity.

The observation is harsh but necessary. French cultural institutions, despite the Malrucian ambition to “make the great works of humanity accessible to the greatest number,” have largely failed to reach youth. Even more serious, they have progressively transformed into spaces of social reproduction, as Michel Schneider denounced in “La Comédie de la culture” (1993). The author described a system where artists and institutions lock themselves into a logic of mutual valorization, an insularity disconnected from the citizens they claim to serve.

Deconstructing the Supposed Homogeneity of Youth

The work of sociologist Camille Peugny provides decisive insight into this failure. They demonstrate the absurdity of discourses that would have “young people” form a homogeneous group. Reality reveals, on the contrary, an extraordinary diversity of cultural practices and tastes. The adolescent passionate about Pink Floyd today - they still exist - will probably be so in twenty years, just like his classmate who loves Maître Gims. This persistence of individual cultural tastes, observable until about age 65, invalidates any monolithic approach to youth.

The only common denominator identified by Peugny is concerning: a shared feeling of fragility about the future, a fear of precariousness that transcends socio-cultural divisions. This collective vulnerability calls for an institutional response that cannot be satisfied with a standardized and top-down cultural offering.

Digital as a Living Environment

The question of digital particularly crystallizes intergenerational misunderstandings. We must move beyond the sterile opposition between “real” and “virtual” that still too often structures our view of young people’s digital practices. For generations born with the Internet, digital is not a separate space but a living environment, like the air they breathe. This reality, which Anne Cordier documents in her work on “connected” youth, forces us to reconsider our hasty judgments about “screen time.”

Michel Serres, in “Petite Poucette” (2012), went further by analyzing the invention of SMS language not as cultural degradation but as the emergence of new cognitive skills. Inventing a language, creating new modes of communication, developing unprecedented neural connections: this is what young people do with digital technology. Far from being passive consumers, they develop knowledge that we, adults, struggle to understand and even less to value.

Cultural Rights: A Necessary Paradigm Shift

Faced with these observations, cultural rights emerge as an indispensable conceptual framework. Inscribed in French law since 2015 (NOTRe law) and 2016 (LCAP law), they mark - or should mark - a radical turning point in our approach to cultural policies. It is no longer just about “democratizing” access to a legitimate culture defined by institutions, but about recognizing and respecting culture in the anthropological sense: what constitutes each person in their identity, practices, and references.

The Fribourg Declaration (2007), the fruit of work by philosopher Patrice Meyer-Bisch and numerous experts, structures these rights around eight fundamental dimensions: identity, diversity, heritage, community, participation, cooperation, education, and information. At the heart of this approach: unconditional respect for human dignity.

Let’s take a concrete example: a young person arriving from abroad, mastering five languages but struggling in French. The current system tends to stigmatize them for their linguistic shortcomings, obscuring their multiple skills. Cultural rights invite us to reverse this perspective: recognize and value all their knowledge to enable them to find their place and participate fully in the cultural life of the city.

From Democratization to Cultural Democracy

This transformation implies clearly distinguishing two approaches. Cultural democratization, inherited from Malraux, postulates a top-down supply logic: institutions hold legitimate culture that they must transmit to the people. Cultural democracy, on the other hand, recognizes the plurality of cultures and promotes their horizontal dialogue.

This distinction is not merely intellectual. It has major practical implications. In the first case, we bring “captive audiences” - those classes dragged to the theater - to shows they haven’t chosen, with untrained teachers who themselves feel illegitimate. Predictable result: an often negative experience that can permanently disgust people with institutional culture.

In the second case, we co-construct spaces where everyone can bring their references, practices, and questions. We recognize that cultural expertise is not the prerogative of professionals but is distributed throughout the social body.

Institutional Resistance

The example of cultural closures during the Covid-19 pandemic cruelly reveals our blockages. While in Belgium, cultural centers collectively resisted incoherent decisions, affirming their mission of service to citizens, most French institutions obeyed without protest. This difference in attitude raises questions: are we serving citizens or our own institutional reproduction?

This question disturbs, particularly in large national venues where there is fear that cultural rights might lead to leveling relativism. “If everything is equal, where is our excellence?” we sometimes hear. This fear reveals a profound misunderstanding: recognizing the diversity of cultural practices does not mean denying differences in technical or artistic mastery. It simply means accepting that excellence can take multiple forms and that institutional culture does not hold a monopoly on it.

Experience at the Center

John Dewey, in “Art as Experience” (1934), offers us a precious key. Art is not the work itself but the lived experience in the encounter with it. This approach, which joins American pragmatist philosophy, places the person at the center of the cultural process.

Digital giants have understood this perfectly. UX Design (User Experience Design) is nothing other than the systematic implementation of this principle: creating hyper-personalized experiences where each user feels recognized and valued. Faced with this formidable competition, cultural institutions can no longer be content to offer a standardized offering hoping that young people will come.

Practical Implications: Rethinking Our Methods

This Copernican revolution requires transforming our professional practices in depth. It involves moving from a vertical transmission posture to a horizontal elaboration dynamic. This implies accepting a certain loss of control over discourse and content, which is never comfortable for professionals accustomed to holding legitimate expertise.

Participatory methodologies offer concrete avenues. When we ask a group to collectively define “what is youth?” or “what is culture?”, we are not seeking THE right answer but making the diversity of representations emerge. The work is no longer the expert’s unique discourse but the shared experience of collective elaboration.

This approach also requires rethinking the question of framework. How do we create spaces where controversy is possible without becoming destructive? Children, in their games, often spend more time negotiating rules than actually playing. This childish wisdom teaches us the importance of time spent co-constructing the framework of our interactions.

A Fundamental Democratic Issue

Beyond technical questions, it is the very vitality of our democracy that is at stake. If cultural institutions, financed by public money, only address a privileged fraction of the population, they betray their fundamental mission. Marjorie Glas brilliantly demonstrates this in “Quand l’art chasse le populaire”: public theater, conceived after the war as a tool for popular emancipation, has become a place of bourgeois reproduction.

Cultural rights offer a framework for reconnecting with the original democratic ambition. They remind us that culture is not a soul supplement for the privileged but what constitutes us all as human beings. They rehabilitate popular education, long despised by institutional culture, by recognizing that knowledge is built through exchange and not unilateral transmission.

The Urgency to Act

Faced with youth who deeply doubt their future, who feel precarious and little recognized, we can no longer be content to reproduce obsolete patterns. The necessary transformation is profound: it is not about marginally adjusting our practices but fundamentally rethinking our relationship to culture and youth.

This transformation will not be comfortable. It implies questioning our certainties, sharing our power, accepting that our cultural references are only part of a much vaster landscape. But the stakes are worth it: making culture what it should never have stopped being - a living space for collective construction of meaning, where every voice counts and where diversity is not a problem to solve but a wealth to cultivate.

Cultural rights offer us the compass for this necessary reinvention. It is up to us to seize them, not as an additional legal constraint, but as a historic opportunity to reconcile culture with its democratic vocation. Experience shows that when we take this step aside, when we accept to consider young people as partners and not as audiences to educate, extraordinary things can happen. Isn’t this, ultimately, what we all aspire to?