Dilapidation of resources in supply logic

Faced with the crisis in the cultural sector, it is urgent to shift from a top-down supply logic to a culture of connection and listening, inspired by digital practices.

Traditional supply logic versus the digital model

The cultural field is traditionally organized according to a supply logic: programming films in movie theaters, theater performances, concerts or dance performances in dedicated venues. Professionals develop proposals intended for potential spectators who either trust the programmers or select what corresponds to their tastes from the range of available offerings. On digital platforms like Netflix or YouTube, the principle seems identical: we move toward content that speaks to us and interests us.

However, a fundamental difference distinguishes Netflix’s offering from that of a movie theater. Netflix integrates the entire chain, from production to distribution, relying on extremely fine analyses of its audiences’ behavior. Netflix’s offering thus transcends simple proposal to become what I would call a connection. Take the example of the series House of Cards: its production resulted from meticulous analysis of Netflix audience data. Fifteen years ago already, artificial intelligences were deducing the precise expectations of the platform’s viewers regarding themes, actors, and other key elements.

The professionals who wrote and directed this series mobilized all their creative skills while integrating extremely fine listening to the expectations of their future viewers, viewers who were unaware, moreover, that their usage had allowed their desires to be deduced. This series, remarkably produced and enlightening about contemporary political functioning, demonstrates that an approach initially perceived as a marketing strategy can lead to the creation of a very high-quality work. In traditional cultural venues, theaters, cinemas, this precise feedback from spectators is sorely lacking.

Programming choices then depend essentially on the tastes and skills of programmers who travel through theater, dance, music or cinema festivals to compose proposals they hope will be attractive to the inhabitants of their territory. This empirical model, based on a hierarchy where some decide for others, seems to me to belong to the past. Young generations, deeply engaged in digital cultural practices via social networks, moreover show marked disinterest in these top-down proposals. Their cultural daily life is organized according to a disintermediated system, made of horizontal recommendations between peers and free and democratic paths.

The intelligence of algorithms: between personalization and openness

Contrary to received ideas, choice always remains possible. TikTok’s algorithm, for example, learns with remarkable precision users’ centers of interest and proposes content of striking relevance. TikTok’s algorithm is designed to maximize viewing time and engagement by showing the right content to the right person at the right time. The main factors that influence the TikTok algorithm are user interactions, video information, and device and account settings.

Far from simplistic discourse about filter bubbles and algorithmic confinement, TikTok’s algorithm demonstrates exceptional finesse. TikTok strives to keep users’ “For You” feed “interesting,” “varied,” and “safe.” It opens to diversity while responding to the need for openness inherent in human beings, combining attention to personal tastes and discovery of unexpected content, those proposals we wouldn’t have spontaneously searched for.

In 2025, TikTok’s algorithm is one of the most advanced content recommendation systems on the market. During the first 120 days of use, average daily time on the platform increases from about 29 minutes on the first day to 50 minutes on the last day. This ability to maintain engagement demonstrates the sophistication of the system. This can be interpreted as an addiction logic, or as a cultural enrichment logic. We don’t accuse of addiction a person who spends a lot of time reading books, or who goes to the theater very regularly!

TikTok’s algorithm functions precisely according to this principle of balance. We are no longer faced with an offering from which we would pick like from a theater program, but faced with a connection, a mutual knowledge that continuously deepens. This disintermediated logic now structures cultural consumption in digital spaces, without forgetting the creative dimension accessible to each user.

Because everyone can also instantly become an author, producer, content creator. No barrier to entry exists, except one’s own shyness. The tool is there, accessible to all, and everyone knows it. Whoever wishes can contribute to the media space, become an actor and no longer a simple spectator, a possibility extremely rarely offered in traditional cultural venues.

Certainly, participatory shows exist, but only when the director has decided it. Impossible to spontaneously mount the stage if it hasn’t been planned. Our power to act is in these spaces extremely reduced compared to what it is in digital space. This is not a criticism, because it is also very pleasant and enriching to be a simple spectator, it is an observation to differentiate a free space, digital space, where we can take the role we want, and a constrained space, with fixed assignments (spectators, artists, professionals...) in the traditional cultural sector.

In physical space, our capacity for action remains limited compared to digital space. A hierarchy imposes itself, barriers arise. The path to becoming an actor or director remains opaque and complex, punctuated by obstacles, competition, and multiple social domination issues. Digital space, on the other hand, keeps the door open. Everyone is free to cross it according to their abilities and desires.

The democratic rupture: cultural institutions and citizens

Professionals struggle to grasp citizens’ real expectations. How to achieve this? In the training sessions I lead, I encourage permanent and diversified inquiry, notably via adapted digital tools. The difficulty of the exercise must be acknowledged. Cultural venues and their traditional work organization methods were not designed for this listening, unlike digital platforms.

Notions such as “user-centered” and “user experience” (UX) are not common in the vocabulary of the cultural milieu, because they find their roots in the computer world. However, UX design and cultural mediation are very close, and we could even consider UX design, in the context of culture, as a type of cultural mediation that we could call experiential mediation.

Cultural sector professionals too often find themselves alone facing their decisions. Like elected officials who, once our vote is expressed, consider having received total delegation and no longer having to be accountable, even when we express our disagreement. Yet we are the ones who placed them there. These attitudes cut institutions off from their citizens and from the democratic role that should be theirs. Popular expression in demonstrations has not been heard for years. Even the results of the legislative elections of July 2024 were not respected.

In large cultural institutions, professionals make relatively arbitrary decisions to spend public budgets in total democratic disconnection. The illusion persists thanks to faithful spectators, often the same ones, who come to inflate attendance statistics. We add up entries without ever distinguishing, as we do on the internet, the number of visits from the number of unique visitors. This distinction would reveal the restricted number of people actually reached. Cultural institutions unfortunately function as spaces of bourgeois reproduction.

This recalls Pierre Bourdieu’s work which, from the 1960s, denounced this social reproduction. In 1966, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel demonstrate that the “need for culture” is socially constructed and that the theory of “revelation” rests on an ideology of gift, which allows naturalizing cultural dominations without questioning the privileges that determine them. The increase in the proportion of graduates from one generation to another seems to be witness to an innovative and beneficial process of school democratization, but Bourdieu shows that school remains reproductive of social inequalities. And since his work, the world has evolved greatly, the disconnection between the subsidized cultural sector and youth, for example, is complete.

And unfortunately, mandatory school trips perpetuate this system. Children are constrained there, poorly accompanied for lack of adequate teacher training, and struggle to receive what is offered to them. These proposals impose themselves as dominant against their own culture, presupposing that they must be offered quality works to compensate for the supposed mediocrity of their autonomous digital consumption. This approach violates their cultural rights and their dignity, and testifies to disinterest in who they are, in the value of their specific cultures, which would allow making connections, without any demagogy.

The non-connection is established on a negative presupposition concerning young people’s cultural practices. Faced with this imposition, any normally constituted person can only revolt. Resistance is created against this cultural field which presents itself as open but functions, in the reality of interaction, as a closed and condescending imposition system. Hypocrisy adds to insult when discourse proclaims open-mindedness! Moreover, in the cultural milieu, examination of gender equality and ethnic diversity reveals overwhelming domination by white men. Women and minorities remain largely under-represented. The height of irony for a supposedly open space!

These places are manifestly not spaces of cultural openness in the anthropological sense, but spaces of cultural imposition and domination. Public money and human resources are thus being squandered for a very long time. Careful, I absolutely don’t want to say that everything is “to be thrown away,” because there are artistic and professional teams who have magnificent commitments; what I criticize here is the form of this professional sector, which doesn’t invite openness.

The cultural sector benefited from unconditional support from politicians of all sides, who found there a sincerely cultural interest but also an interest in power. The Opera perfectly illustrates this duality: a place for creating remarkable works, but also a space for organizing and reproducing power.

I don’t claim at all that all cultural sector professionals are insensitive dominants who should be removed. Many of them are quality people, human, democratic and well-intentioned. But the organizational system intrinsically carries domination and resource squandering, despite the best intentions.

The perpetual quest to attract youth testifies to this. Why don’t young people come? We look for films supposedly appealing to them, adapted shows... We invest massively in social media communication, in websites, without any conclusive success. The reason is anthropological: we have changed neither our organizational system nor our work methods. We remain prisoners of supply logic.

Toward an aesthetics of relationship: rethinking cultural innovation

This supply logic generates waste of resources, which elected officials are beginning to perceive clearly, and which is one of the justifications for massive disengagement in this year 2025 from public funding of culture. It is supply logic that must imperatively be rethought.

I don’t mean by this that everything should be transformed into participatory projects. Netflix is not participatory, but practices permanent listening, automated certainly, but very real. Netflix can record every aspect of its viewers’ behavior: when you pause, rewind or fast-forward in the film you’re watching, for example. This logic of permanent listening, placed at the heart of cultural professionals’ work, could generate extremely diversified projects. No single model is imposed, but all projects must be anchored in listening and connection, in openness, that is, in democracy and all these values we claim to defend.

These values cannot remain words. They must become acts, methods. This transformation requires immense questioning of professional postures and work methods, both between professionals and with spectators or participants. It’s about reinventing our methods. Why should the cultural domain remain frozen when all other professions are transforming under the effect of technological and sociological evolutions?

This transformation doesn’t only concern technical innovations, new ways of filming or LED lighting replacing incandescent lamps. These aspects are secondary. The essential lies in anthropological changes, to be operated voluntarily rather than “defending” outdated and dominating approaches to culture. True innovation doesn’t concern what we show on stage, but our way of being in relationship. What is transforming in the world is the political organizational system in the broad sense. This is what must be questioned, what we must train on, experiment with, work on.

This revolution could completely upset artistic forms, an absolutely exciting prospect. We need animator-artists capable of orchestrating these exchanges, like digital platform designers who continuously evolve their creations according to observed usage. Algorithms are never fixed. The cultural sector must acquire this same agility. Continuous evaluation must replace old temporalities. The obsolete model of a team secretly preparing for months the perfect show to dazzle passive spectators must no longer be the norm and panacea, but one of the ways of doing, and above all exit its position of superiority over all other modalities of artistic forms.

This evolution in no way implies abandoning artistic requirement. On the contrary, this requirement must be cultivated even more deeply, broadened to integrate the aesthetics of relationship, beyond the aesthetics of image, sound, scenography or musical composition. John Dewey and his conception of art as experience must inspire us. In Art as Experience, Dewey’s concern is the education of the ordinary human. For Dewey, “the value of experience lies not only in the ideals it reveals, but in its power to unveil various ideals” and “the value of ideals lies in the experiences they make possible.”

Aesthetic experience is, consequently, the paradigm of experience for Dewey since it allows awareness of transformations operated by interactions between the individual and environment. Art thought as experience allows restoring this power to act, and requires aesthetic concepts and work methods to be measured by their faculty to improve our experience. This work dates from 1934. It would be time to be inspired by it, otherwise an entire sector will sink.

Digital giants practice UX design, user experience design, with permanent testing and adjustments. UX design takes into account, for example, the needs of visitors with physical, sensory or cognitive limitations. Elements such as readable texts, audio content and adapted tactile devices contribute to an inclusive experience.

This approach is nothing like low-grade marketing. It’s taking care of connections, and that’s how it must be envisioned. Taking care of connections constitutes an essential part of our professions.

The cultural sector today crosses an unprecedented crisis of political legitimacy, attacked from all sides. Territorial communities, all political sides combined, massively reduce their financial support to the cultural sector. This crisis is painful, but to face it, stubbornly defending the past serves no purpose. We must rethink the very nature of our work. This reflection should have preceded the crisis. But no matter the context, it is imperative to fundamentally rethink the question of supply.