On the Fragility of Corporatism

The recent condemnation of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region has aroused enthusiasm among performing arts professionals. Yet, this provisional legal victory masks, in my view, a real problem: the corporatist defense of a caste at the expense of cultural democracy.

The Illusion of Victory and Corporatist Naivety

The performing arts profession is celebrating the first-instance condemnation of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region for “irregular refusal to disburse cultural funding.” On October 14, 2025, the Lyon administrative court sanctioned the cancellation of a subsidy to the Théâtre Nouvelle Génération, a decision motivated by political considerations. However, I believe that cultural professionals are celebrating too soon:

• First, because this condemnation is only at first instance. The region has appealed and the final outcome remains uncertain. To believe that this is a definitive victory when the procedure will likely continue up to the Court of Cassation shows a certain naivety. As proclaimed in the October 2025 newsletter of Syndeac, this decision « constitutes a strong signal in favor of freedom of expression and the independence of cultural institutions. It reaffirms that public funding cannot be used as instruments of political pressure and that it must remain based on transparent, equitable criteria that respect the principle of equality among cultural actors. » But this formulation reveals precisely the problem: it confuses proclaimed independence with real autonomy.
• Second, and this is the heart of my argument here, because this supposed independence of cultural institutions is a myth. Who appoints the directors of institutions? Elected officials. The very choice of people who lead these structures already constitutes a political program. Historically, this choice tended toward left-wing sensibilities. Today, it leans toward right-wing choices. But it’s no more political now than before; it has always been so.

False Independence: A Structural Lie

Michel Schneider clearly establishes, in La comédie de la culture (1993), the nature of public funding:

« Modern states that subsidize creation, veritable collective patrons, are not in continuity with princes, because between them and the princes lies precisely the advent of democracy and the distinction it made between public and private money. Public money does not belong to those who dispose of it. Its use is not only embedded in a set of rules and procedures that prohibit its individual appropriation, but it is of a different nature, politically and socially, from private money. »

This distinction radically changes what can legitimately be called “freedom.” Schneider continues:

« The people’s elected representative does not dispose of it solely to magnify his person, his party, or his reign. This is a distinction that I had great difficulty getting accepted in discussions about certain artists’ fees. »

He thus demonstrates that public money obeys democratic rules that prohibit its discretionary use.

Professionals assert their independence regarding programming and artistic choices. But this freedom remains largely illusory. If a show truly displeased for political reasons, to believe that elected officials wouldn’t interfere amounts to willful blindness. What frames this supposed freedom of expression are, in reality, cultural programs that don’t fundamentally disturb the social reproduction in place.

This is a lie that I think is important to denounce. In all this discourse about freedom of expression and independence, we never talk about audiences, their freedom, their respect, the cultural diversity of the people we’re addressing. Kader Attia and Eva Doumbia express this forcefully in their text « De l’inefficacité de nos œuvres dans la vie réelle » published in July 2023 after the murder of Nahel by a police officer:

« The power that funds us to denounce it makes our words the weapons of our own silences. By celebrating our works, by subsidizing them, by giving us the mission of this “inclusion” of those who resemble us, the power, because it allows violence and murders by officials who are depositaries of its authority, transforms us into inconsequential puppets and useless idiots. »
[…]
« Nahel’s death shows the ineffectiveness of our works in real life. Our names at the bottom of tribunes and manifestos fail in the same way. These last few days, the hope aroused by minutes of silence and texts read at the beginning or end of performances fades when reading articles from CNEWS, BFMTV, or Le Parisien. »

Whose Freedom Are We Talking About When We Invoke “Our Freedoms”?

In reality, what’s at stake is the defense of the privileges of a caste, the caste of the cultural sector, which, claiming to work for freedom, actually chooses for everyone and thus infringes on the freedom of audiences. When we say “our freedoms,” whom are we talking about? One need only look at the sociology of subsidized theater audiences to immediately understand that this is not about freedom for all.

Michel Schneider notes ironically in La comédie de la culture:

« On the strictly social level, in fifteen years of voluntarist policy, the number of regular participants hasn’t budged. These practices haven’t spread more widely among the public and remain occasional for the vast majority of those who engage in them. The social composition of culture enthusiasts has remained rigorously identical since 1973. More seriously, we’ll conclude from these findings that state financing of culture, like that of health or education expenditures, moreover, operates what is conventionally called a negative redistribution in relation to income, since the resource is levied on everyone, rich and poor (with the weak progressivity of French taxation), while cultural expenditure mainly benefits holders of high incomes, and is not only proportional but strongly progressive in relation to income. »

Kader Attia and Eva Doumbia develop this critique with a painful lucidity that deserves to be quoted at length:

« The parents, cousins, brothers, sisters, spouses, the neighbors of victims of police crimes, of the racism we denounce are the absentees from the cultural venues where we tell their stories. Thus we contribute to making their lives into fictions. Like a city’s toponymy often suggests the disappearance of a place or person, they lose their own essence and become abstractions. While we receive applause and ovations for having denounced wars and shipwrecks that lead to the death of so many misnamed “migrants,” children continue to be pursued by dangerous police officers and entire families drown in the Mediterranean... »

Their observation is lucid: institutional culture transforms real lives into abstractions, dramas into applauded fictions, engagement into posture. The fear that reduced public funding will give politicians more power to instrumentalize culture as propaganda is unfounded. Why? Because today, this is already the case.

Symbolic Privilege and Submission to Money

One might object that the cultural sector is underfunded, that professionals don’t earn much money. But privileges are not only financial. It’s a symbolic privilege: that of being part of a superior caste that has the power to spend public money and which, completely unconsciously, is programmed by the political power of the supervising authority.

Michel Schneider aptly describes this perverse mechanism:

« Let art divorce from meaning, form, beauty, let it say nothing to anyone anymore, let there be no more works or public, no matter, as long as there are still artists and politicians, and they continue to support each other: a subsidy for a signature at the bottom of an electoral manifesto. The curtain falls, the play must be judged. Ministry of Culture? No, government of artists. But culture cannot be governed, and it is not a means of government. Nothing is worse than a prince who thinks he’s an artist, except an artist who thinks he’s a prince. »

The Covid episode demonstrated this brilliantly. Cultural professionals applied arbitrary and incoherent decisions without protest, all to the detriment of citizens, with the sole aim of not losing their public funding. It was at that moment that they signed the pact with the devil that authorizes everything happening today. If they had resisted in service of citizens—because let’s never forget that public funding exists to serve the citizens whose taxes finance it—we wouldn’t, in my opinion, be here today.

Rethinking Culture’s Democratic Mission

If there is public funding for culture, it’s to serve citizens. This is not demagoguery, because precisely what we have to offer citizens is emancipation, freedom, but freedom for all, not just the freedom to program when one has reached positions of power.

Kader Attia and Eva Doumbia pose what I believe is the central question with sharp clarity:

« What does this term “inclusion” really cover? Include whom and in what? This word rubs too closely against the unfortunate ones of “savagery” or “de-civilization” to inspire our confidence. To claim that there is de-civilization implies the loss of humanity of those who would be affected by it. Yet, we know what the denial of humanity means. Our ancestors learned it and sometimes their descendants transmitted it to us. Rather than the injunction to inclusion, we would prefer to speak of sharing and mutual learning, enrichment, encounters, diverse thoughts. And finally of justice and equality. »
[…]

« By supporting our artistic works, the institutions of power claim to act for better living together. This is not enough. We need concrete actions against discrimination. Real resources for schools, middle schools, and high schools where we intervene and in which we can only observe the State’s disengagement. Substantial funding for social centers, activity centers, and youth centers whose workshops we occasionally produce cannot replace daily missions. »

I don’t want to deny the real problem posed by cuts in public funding for culture. Yes, it’s a problem, because culture is essential for a society, but it is so for everyone’s emancipation. Precisely, what professionals spending public money must defend is not freedom of creation. If we want to be free to create, we can create by ourselves, without asking for public money; no one prevents us from doing so!

Creation in Service of Cultural Rights

Schneider forcefully develops this point in his analysis of the State’s role:

« What, finally, should the State not do regarding culture? If we refuse the principle of interventions on creation itself, and direct subsidy of artists or entire sections of artistic life, such as live performance, the very expression “aid to creation” appears as a contradictio in adjecto. The democratic State is not and should not be a patron and help creation. For three reasons. The first is that modern states that subsidize creation, veritable collective patrons, are not in continuity with princes [...]. The second reason why it should not directly finance creation is that the State is a bad patron. »

Publicly funded creation must serve citizens’ freedom through demanding but open proposals, co-constructed through dialogue. What must be defended is dialogue and democracy: how are these subsidized cultural projects serving citizens’ freedom? Because there are quotes from Bruno Latour or Michel Foucault in the shows? I’m not saying everything must be participatory, but everything must respect people’s cultural rights. It’s in the law. It’s the mission of projects supported by public money.

Dialogue with Elected Officials: A Strategic Necessity

Politicians need to be advised on the democratic value of subsidized culture. It’s not about defending the freedom of expression of a small caste of artists. Michel Schneider writes it bluntly:

« There’s endless debate: who should administer culture, administrators or artists? The former are not legitimate in the eyes of the latter, who rightly do not recognize any artistic competence in them. The latter are no more legitimate vis-à-vis the functioning rules of democratic States, which require that the use of public funds be distinguished from personal appropriation. There’s a simple way to decide: let’s be convinced that the State, through interposed artists or civil servants, should not administer culture, should not make artistic choices, and should stick to three missions that don’t imply any: heritage preservation, democratic access to works, notably through artistic education and support for amateur practice, regulation. »

Because regardless of their political side, elected officials need social cohesion, citizens who feel integrated. Elected officials don’t have innate knowledge. They need us to dialogue with them, to help them understand how to do better with culture. This is an essential part of artists’ political role.

Beyond Corporatism: Building Spaces for Collective Creation

The problem with this legal action, which remains legitimate in the face of the scandal of Laurent Wauquiez’s action, is that faced with cultural institution leaders entrenched in their privileges and their “freedom,” elected officials are aware that this is about defending privileges. In a way, they’re right to want to deconstruct this, because they are the ones who were elected by universal suffrage, not the directors of cultural structures.

Kader Attia and Eva Doumbia conclude their text with a call that should challenge us all:

« It’s not by building performance halls for music, dance or theater, museums and art galleries, in spaces where people who don’t frequent them live that we buy social peace. We who present our works on these stages sadly observe that they also produce exclusion. We refuse that our works allow politicians to absolve themselves of acting against racism and all other discriminations. Perhaps we should exercise our right to withdrawal. Our ancestors stopped practicing their rituals so as not to offer them to the curiosity or cupidity of their colonizers, so perhaps we should stop speaking. But how could we when anger and injustice compel us to speak? »

As Michel Schneider notes: « The theory of public service, which takes into account the right-claim, was never a theory of “total State.” On the contrary, it opposed the theory of public power, and defined, within precise boundaries, for what purposes and under what modalities the State must act. »

The role of each person working within the framework of spending public money is not only to respect the elected official, but to respect and keep alive and operational the democratic system in which that person was elected.

Proposal: Creative Spaces for Dialogue

The real fight is in defending democratic institutions. Elected officials need help, understanding, to be put back on the right side of democracy. This is everyone’s role. To fight against political power that’s too strong over cultural decisions, we must enter into dialogue.

• First, each of us with audiences in our territory.
• Second, among professionals in a multidisciplinary way.
• Third, with elected officials of all sides.

Putting Art in Service of Democratic Dialogue

Perhaps the cultural projects to undertake today to defend a future for culture are artistic dialogue projects. Putting art in spaces of dialogue isn’t just about dialoguing seriously, it’s about creating together the present and future of culture.

Here then is my proposal for cultural sector professionals: stop making elitist shows that only serve social reproduction. Change completely and create creative spaces for dialogue, artistic ones, with the highest level of both artistic and democratic rigor. Why? Because it’s about public money. This demand must be double. It’s this radical artistic and democratic rigor that must be brought to life and shared. And we will see political support, necessary for culture, return, if it reinvests with sincerity, openness, and self-questioning its democratic commitment.