Artistic Legitimization, Cultural Rights, and Construction of the Individual
Artistic legitimization, between traditional hierarchies and new digital forms, questions individual and collective recognition. By intersecting Dewey, Latour, and cultural rights, let’s explore how art and the mastery of symbolic objects (e.g., disability workshops) legitimize the individual, linking emancipation and social bonds.
The new phase of an institutional history
The process of artistic legitimization is traversed by dynamics of hierarchy and power. It is modified by digital transformations and the stakes of individual recognition. Traditionally, there are instances of power—subjective, financial, symbolic, and political—that consecrate a form of cultural domination associated with certain types of objects, aesthetics, and other strategic issues. Today, these are disrupted by new spaces of legitimization, notably through digital means. And beyond vertical or horizontal structures, a question persists: what fundamentally legitimizes art and, by extension, the individuals who produce it or identify with it?
I propose to quickly explore this issue by intersecting theoretical approaches (John Dewey, Bruno Latour) with concrete practices, particularly concerning the approach of cultural rights and the field of supporting people with disabilities. We will examine the tension between democratic horizontality and the need for individual legitimization, showing how the creation of social bonds and the symbolic mastery of objects can become vectors of emancipation.
Traditional instances and new legitimizations
Historically, artistic legitimization relies on instances that consecrate a form of cultural domination: institutions, the art market, media, communities, etc. This system of the “great” spectacle, of the “great” work, produces vertical recognition, often very exclusive and very excluding. One wants to “enter” the professional milieu, the cinema hall at the Cannes Festival where it is a scramble for domination, or even a performance hall, for which one can wait several hours in a state of stress: will we get in, will we be recognized or not? We find ourselves at the place of human vanities.
Yet, digital technology has introduced alternative forms of legitimization: collaborative platforms, self-publishing, independent circuits. This horizontality may seem democratic, but it raises questions, as purely horizontal recognition (“you are like us”) is not enough: it can level singularities without offering real social validation.
What is legitimizing, both for oneself and in the social space?
The link as a legitimizing foundation: Dewey and Latour
To overcome this vertical/horizontal opposition, we can mobilize two philosophers:
- John Dewey (Art as Experience): legitimacy emerges from shared experience, from art’s capacity to create bonds.
- Bruno Latour: the social is constructed in relationships, and it is this very construction that is legitimizing.
Creating bonds is not just an added soul: it is a political act, a way of representing the world and taking a place in it. Cultural rights, by insisting on the dignity of the person, formalize this idea: to contribute to society, one must first feel legitimized as an individual.
The individual before the collective? A methodological prerequisite
I advocate for an approach centered on the individual, for example, in my work with disabled people in professional reintegration through art. My method, influenced by psychoanalysis, involves the object as a legitimizing third party:
- Offering objects (tools, creative supports) and learning to master them allows for building competence.
- This mastery becomes a lever for peer recognition: the group perceives differently the one who masters a skill.
Concrete example: During a workshop, participants discover sculpture. The learned technique (a “symbolic” object) gives them legitimacy in the eyes of the group, modifying social dynamics. This approach is not the only possible one (others prioritize the collective), but it responds to a Western need for individual recognition.
Cultural rights: a framework to reconcile individual and collective
Cultural rights remind us that dignity is based on self-recognition, which requires spaces where the individual feels respected. The challenge is therefore to create collective frameworks that allow this validation, without falling into the pitfall of isolating individualism.
I insist: it is not about sequencing (“first the individual, then the collective”), but about thinking in circular interactions. A democratic workshop, for example, must both:
- Allow everyone to express themselves (individual legitimization).
- Transform this expression into a collective contribution (social legitimization).
Legitimizing to emancipate
The question of artistic legitimization goes beyond the field of art: it refers to citizenship. Being legitimized is acquiring the right to act on the world. Methods vary (psychoanalytic approach, collective work, etc.), but the objective remains the same: to create virtuous circles where individual recognition and collective action feed each other.
In this, cultural rights offer a precious compass, reminding us that culture is not a luxury, but a tool for reconstructing oneself—and therefore, society.
The “cultural rights”, which derive from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a concept developed and defended by researchers, sociologists, philosophers, political leaders and actors of the cultural world. Present in a certain number of articles of law since 2001, the cultural rights aim at highlighting and formalizing, in order to be able to make them operative, the principles of a “cultural democracy”. To summarize it quickly, it is a question of each person being able to give value to his or her personal culture, in order to be able to exercise his or her citizenship: to express himself or herself, to defend his or her point of view, to create, to develop his or her practices, to have access to a cultural diversity, etc. Cultural rights operate in a much wider field than that of the strict cultural sector.
The notion of “cultural rights” is present in France in the laws NOTRe (2015) and LCAP (2016). It is carried by a delegation of the Ministry of Culture (General Delegation for transmission, territories, since January 1, 2021).
Paradoxically, cultural rights are difficult to implement in the cultural sector, which is traditionally rather attached to “cultural democratization”: one often defends the idea of the transmission to the public of works of art of the best possible quality, according to a principle of hierarchy of “cultural values”. Thus, the cultural rights can be lived by certain professionals of the culture as a dangerous dynamics for the Art, a tendency towards the amateur practices, which is not the case.
In my point of view, which is that of a practitioner/researcher in the cultural field, cultural rights are above all a practice, an exercise of democracy in the very methods of organization of the work, of the relation to the other and of the place of each one, the choices of programming, the methods of mediation and animation of workshops, the mode of territorial inscription of the cultural policy, etc.
I propose in this section concrete working methods for good practices of implementation of cultural rights, based on my field experiences, as well as a sharing of more theoretical reflections, in the framework of my own research on cultural rights.
I place myself in the filiation of thinkers like John Dewey. But cultural rights cannot be presented without mentioning Patrice Meyer-Bisch, Jean-Michel Lucas, Christelle Blouët, the “Fribourg Declaration”, etc.
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