A society without artists cannot stand. The claim is easy to state and hard to argue for. Here I try to ground it, by bringing together a proposal from Australia, the surveys on amateur artistic practice, and what cultural rights teach us about culture.
A proposal from Australia
The shift comes from APRA AMCOS, the Australian music rights society. The idea, put forward in the summer of 2026, fits into a single sentence: stop talking about “funding” artists, and define artists and their environments as society’s infrastructure. I heard it reported by the German composer Matthias Hornschuh, in a working group of the conference “Between Creation and Simulation” on artificial intelligence and creation, where we were working together on human relationships, values and rights. He had learned of it only a few days earlier. So it is neither mine nor the conference’s, and I want to make that clear, because the value of an idea also depends on knowing where it comes from and in what context it was formulated: that of an authors’ society negotiating, in 2026, the conditions of economic survival of its members in the face of the automation of music production.
The shift is first of all a shift in language. Funding gets debated, voted on, cut. An infrastructure gets maintained, repaired, developed, because collective life depends on it. Nobody debates every year whether water supply networks are a good idea. What we call infrastructure is that whose necessity is no longer up for deliberation.
What interests me in this proposal is not the budgetary argument, which is an argument of circumstance and is worth what arguments of circumstance are worth. It is what the proposal obliges us to demonstrate. For to say that art is an infrastructure is not to say that it is precious, or that it makes life more beautiful, or that it deserves to be defended. It is to say that society does not function without it, just as it does not function without roads. That claim needs to be established. And it so happens that the detour through artificial intelligence, which forces us to restate what we mean by human, is what led me to look seriously for the terms of this demonstration, when I thought I had held it for a long time.
What we mean by culture
The word culture does not mean the same thing depending on whether we are talking about the cultural sector or about cultural rights. In the first case, culture is a field of activity, with its works, its professionals, its institutions, its budgets. In the second, it is what constitutes us: the language we speak, the stories we heard as children, what we eat, where our forebears come from, what we listen to, what we watch, what we tell. This is the anthropological sense, that of the 2007 Fribourg Declaration, the one French law took up in 2015 and 2016. In this sense, nobody is without culture, and the question of access to culture is badly posed from the outset: we all have one, we are already in it.
This distinction entirely changes the nature of the problem. If art were an ornament added to a culture that would exist without it, one could at a pinch consider doing without it, or reserving it for those who care about it. If culture is what constitutes us, then the question becomes: what part do artistic practices take in this constitution of ourselves? And why would that part be irreplaceable?
Making special
Ellen Dissanayake spent her life on this question, largely on the margins of academia, without a post or tenure, which is not irrelevant to what she defends. In What Is Art For? (1988) and then Homo Aestheticus (1992), she proposes to consider art not as an object but as a behaviour, which she calls artification, or “making special”: the tendency to treat certain things, certain moments, certain gestures as distinct from the ordinary, by elaborating them, repeating them, giving them rhythm, exaggerating them. Decorating a tool, giving rhythm to a chant, adorning a body, shaping a syllable. This behaviour is found in every known human society, it is very old, it precedes by far the appearance of anything resembling a professional artist, and it brings intrinsic pleasure.
Dissanayake’s hypothesis is that this behaviour has a function. Making special is how a human group marks what matters, synchronises its affects and makes shareable what would otherwise remain private. Birth, death, harvest, war: wherever the stakes are vital, humans do not merely act, they elaborate. This elaboration is not a decorative supplement to effective action, it is what makes action collectively bearable. It draws the line between the event that is endured and the event that is instituted.
One can dispute this thesis, and it has been disputed. What I retain is that it displaces the site of the demonstration. It does not ask what artists produce, it asks what making special does to humans. And it situates this activity at the level of the species, not at the level of a profession.
An experience, not a contemplation
John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), follows a neighbouring line of reasoning by other paths. His inaugural move is to refuse to start from the museum. The work on display, isolated, sacralised, is for him the end point of a process whose starting point lies elsewhere: in ordinary experience, in the rhythms of the body, in the fact that living consists in alternating ruptures and recoveries of equilibrium with one’s milieu. Aesthetic experience is ordinary experience brought to a point of intensity and completeness at which it feels itself. It is not of another nature than the experience of living, it is its fulfilment.
From this follows a consequence that Dewey embraces and that concerns us. If art is an experience, then to receive it is to make it. The spectator is not the passive recipient of a meaning deposited by an author, but retraces on their own account the path by which meaning is constituted. I have been working with this idea for a long time in my mediation practice, where it has immediate practical consequences: it forbids treating people as receptacles, and it obliges us to design our settings around what people are going to do, not around what we are going to transmit to them.
Dewey added, in The Public and Its Problems (1927), that democracy is not primarily a system of government but a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. If aesthetic experience is the place where an experience makes itself communicable without being reduced to a message, then it is a political operator.
What an amateur does
The French figures are more massive than people think. The survey on cultural practices conducted by the DEPS, the research department of the French ministry of culture, in 2018 establishes that 45% of people aged fifteen and over, that is 23.4 million people, practised at least one artistic activity as amateurs over the previous twelve months, among music, writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video editing, theatre, dance and circus. Over a lifetime, the proportion reaches 70%. These people aim neither at the market nor at professionalisation. They appear in no statistics on cultural employment. Yet they constitute, in volume, most of the artistic activity taking place in France.
Antoine Hennion has shown what is gained by looking at these practices for themselves. In his pragmatics of the amateur, developed notably in La Passion musicale (1993, translated as The Passion for Music) and then in his work on taste as attachment, he refuses the sociological position that would see in taste nothing but a signal of social position, a game of distinction of which amateurs would be the dupes and sociology the revealer. He proposes on the contrary to take seriously what amateurs do: the techniques they elaborate, the conditions they arrange, the devices they improvise so that something may happen to them. Taste is not a state, it is an activity, and a competent, reflexive activity, capable of discussing itself.
This reversal has a reach that goes beyond the sociology of music. It undoes the hierarchy that places professionals at the centre, the public at the other end as a passive reverse side, and in between a residual and archaic population, the amateurs, pale imitations of the professional model. Hennion holds that it is by watching amateurs at work that we best understand what art is today, because there we see laid bare what it fundamentally is, an attempt to understand what we are by doing something together.
A village choir, a photography club, a writing workshop, a band rehearsing in a garage on Saturdays: these are places where people have the experience of elaborating, of taking up again, of failing, of starting over, and of doing so with others. It is there, in volume, that the function identified by Dissanayake is exercised in contemporary French society. A cultural policy that saw in these practices only a breeding ground, or an initiation to the real works, would be mistaken about what it is funding.
The trap of the artist elite
As soon as we claim that art is essential to society, the temptation is immediate to conclude that those who make it are essential in a particular way, that they see what others do not see, that they emancipate, that they enlighten. Nathalie Heinich has traced the historical construction of this figure in L’élite artiste (Gallimard, 2005). She shows how, in the nineteenth century, the figure of the artist was constituted by claiming both singularity against bourgeois ordinariness and a form of nobility against the aristocracy of birth, producing an elite of a new kind, legitimised by exception rather than by function. This regime of singularity, she says, keeps the art world in permanent oscillation between the claim to exceptionality and the reduction of artistic activity to ordinary work.
The artist elite is a position of domination. It installs a hierarchy between those who know how to see and those who must be brought to see, and this hierarchy is exactly what the French policy of cultural democratisation organised as public policy for half a century. It is incompatible with cultural rights, whose whole purpose is to recognise in each person a cultural legitimacy of their own, and which therefore pave the way for a true cultural democracy, as opposed to cultural democratization.
The infrastructure argument therefore holds only if it is kept away from this slope. It does not say that artists are indispensable because they would be the guides. It says that artistic practice, in all its forms, professional and amateur, of creation and of reception, is a social function of which nobody can be deprived without damage. Professional artists stand in this infrastructure as engineers stand in the electricity grid: they carry its most elaborate skills, they guarantee its technical transmission, and this makes them neither the owners of the current nor the only people entitled to use it.
What the encounter produces
I have been leading creative workshops for years, with teenagers, teachers, artists, teams in work situations. In my collective intelligence methodologies, I always include artistic practice, and not as a breather or a warm-up. I do it because it is what produces the result.
What happens in these situations is fairly constant. A person who has to make something, rather than say something, finds themselves engaged in a way that is not only intellectual. The gesture precedes the formulation, and it brings up things that formulation alone would not have reached. What is produced is there, in front of everyone, as an object that no longer quite belongs to whoever made it, and which can therefore be looked at without the person being directly exposed. This distancing is what makes speech possible. And the fact that it is done together, under the same constraint, with the same poor means, produces an equality of situation that cannot be decreed.
This is not therapy and it is not illustration. It is a mode of access to what a group knows without knowing it, and it has no equivalent in ordinary discussion settings. A meeting produces positions; a workshop produces materials. Positions are defended, materials are looked at.
The paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott gave a name to what opens up in these situations. In Playing and Reality (1971), he describes an intermediate area between inner reality and the outside world, which he calls potential space, where the child plays, and where, later, in the adult, cultural experience is located. This localisation is not an image. Winnicott holds that culture is situated neither inside nor outside, but in this in-between, and that this in-between is not a given. It opens only in a sufficiently reliable environment, it requires a frame that holds, and it closes as soon as the frame fails. What the person leading a workshop does, when they prepare the space, announce how the time will unfold and allow themselves to welcome the unforeseen, is this, holding a frame so that a potential space may open in others.
We can then say what the infrastructure consists of, beyond the formula. An infrastructure is not a stock, it is a network of maintained conditions. Road infrastructure is not the sum of the journeys made, it is what makes journeys possible, the roadway, the signage, the trades that maintain it, the rules that govern it. In the same way, the artistic infrastructure of a society is not the sum of its works. It is the set of conditions that allow the experience of elaborating to take place, the times and places reserved for it, the frames that make it possible, the skills of the people who know how to open them, and the chains of transmission through which these skills pass from one generation to the next. The millions of amateur practices form its capillary network, schools, conservatoires, stages and workshops are among its nodes, and professionals hold in it the function of the most elaborate competence and of its transmission.
Like any infrastructure, this one is invisible as long as it works. We do not notice the conditions of possibility of our own experience, any more than we think of the roadway while driving. We notice them only when they degrade. What circulates in this network is not a good but a capacity, that of symbolising, of making oneself communicable, of encountering oneself in the making and of encountering others otherwise than in the exchange of opinions. A society that lets the places where this happens degrade does not lose an amenity. It loses an organ.
AI forces us to say it
The automation of artistic production puts the income of professional creators under a pressure that Katharina Uppenbrink and Jean-Louis Giavitto, among others, documented with figures at the Genshagen conference, and I refer for this to the account I wrote of it. This pressure is real, it is brutal, and it calls for public policy and legal responses.
But it also produces a second effect, which is the one that occupies me here. By making available the manufacture of objects that resemble works, it obliges us to say what we expected of art, something we had never needed to make explicit because nothing threatened it. If what we expected was the result, then part of that result is now produced otherwise, and the debate legitimately concerns remuneration and competition. If what we expected was the experience, Dewey’s, Dissanayake’s, that of amateur practice in Hennion, then what is at stake is not the production of objects but the maintenance of the conditions in which humans have the experience of elaborating. And those conditions no machine manufactures and no machine abolishes: they are political conditions.
Cultural rights provide the legal framework for this requirement. The Fribourg Declaration recognises each person’s right to take part in cultural life, to practise their own culture, to have their culture recognised. This right is not a right to consume works. It is a right to make, and a right to be recognised in what one makes. A cultural policy that took seriously the definition of art as infrastructure would have to draw the consequences: fund the conditions of practice as much as the production of works, consider the millions of amateurs not as an audience but as the most extensive part of the network, and defend professional artists not in the name of their exception but in the name of the function they hold in a whole that exceeds them.
A society without artists cannot stand, not because it would be less beautiful, but because it would be deprived of that by which it makes itself thinkable to itself.
