For a virtuous dispersal of the cultural sector
The cultural sector is going through a major crisis that reveals a paradigm shift. In my opinion, we must now cultivate culture everywhere, in all sectors.
A paradigm shift at work
The French cultural sector is in a phase of very great financial difficulty at the beginning of 2025. What is at stake has been in the works for a long time, and in my view outlines a major paradigm shift. Of course, we must defend public cultural policies in a committed and lucid manner, but we must also think about the future of the functioning and organization of art and cultural activities, taking into account the profound anthropological changes that are actually at work behind these budgetary and political tensions. This is what I propose here. For current difficulties, I refer to the very relevant “Cartocrise Culture 2025” proposed by the Observatory of Cultural Policies.
The end of symbolic power
The current crisis is not a crisis of culture, because cultural practices have never been so invested by human beings, with incredible access and massive uses. There is a crisis for some, and for a certain professional milieu, but no crisis per se. It is a crisis for those who are losing the power they had.
The public professional cultural sector has completely lost its symbolic power. Historically linked to politics, it exercised significant influence since Louis XIV, who used it as a tool of power. Then, one went to the Opera in one’s box for important meetings, high-level negotiations and marriages of interest between the powerful.
Today, the places of real power, those where contemporary money circulates, do without the traditional cultural sector. Those who hold the money are no longer those who frequent the opera and theater. Notables still go there, certainly, but they are yesterday’s notables, a culture in decline, which is gradually losing its political influence, whether local, national or international. I’m not sure that in the end this is such bad news.
Cultivating culture everywhere
Here is what I propose: we must cultivate a multitude of cultural services everywhere. Human activities are flourishing: commerce, public works, education, or finance of course, for example. There are problems everywhere, and the development of inequalities is terrible, certainly, but there is potential and financial means in many places of civil life. It would be false to say “there is no money”.
What I believe we need to support today and tomorrow, at the ministerial level as in local communities, is the scattering of the cultural sector. By this I mean developing new cultural skills in all environments: in banking, in transport, in construction, wherever we want, everywhere! Not just 1% cultural obligations, but a real integration of culture into professional and collective structures themselves, both public and private.
The revolution of cultural practices at work
Let’s take the example of works councils. Historically, they have been very large consumers of culture. But that was the era when, to access motivating cultural offerings, one had to go out, one had to travel to the theater, to the museum, to experience cultural practices different from one’s daily life.
Today, the main cultural practices take place within companies themselves. How many employees watch YouTube videos during their working hours? How many consult Instagram between two files, or have lunch alone in their office in front of a Netflix series?
Rethinking the mission of public cultural service and the arts
The mission of a cultural policy, whether carried out by public power or within private companies, is to offer something other than people’s autonomous cultural practices. But why offer something else, when people already have their cultural uses? Precisely to conduct a real cultural policy, that is to say to support the diversity of creation, bring greater emancipation, support amateur artistic practices, etc. This is where we will do public service work, that is to say, do something else with art and culture than simply sell or “consume” them. And this can develop, particularly economically, in a disseminated way, within all collective, associative and professional places. This will involve reinventions of artistic forms, their formats, durations and modalities of public participation. If “we go for it”, if we innovate, if we transmit the importance of culture everywhere and its benefits for collective spaces of any kind, as I concretely advocate in this article, we will renew professions, and invent the cultural sector of tomorrow, in touch with the world.
And then we must articulate culture with issues of well-being, physical and mental health, citizenship, secularism, personal construction and other psychosocial skills. The mission of public service is not, contrary to what some still claim, the simple dissemination to the greatest number of the great works of humanity, it is to build a better world thanks to the arts and culture, to their sharing, in increasingly horizontal relationships.
Adapting the system to new realities
Since practices have changed, the system must adapt. External cultural venues, museums, theaters, cinemas and other event spaces, will not disappear. But from now on, they must compose with other symbolic places, not necessarily geographical: digital platforms.
This massive change in cultural practices cannot be ignored. We must imperatively anticipate it, propose experiments, invent new devices, new ways of creating. This is our collective responsibility.
My multidisciplinary practices—spanning creation, cultural action, training, and support in a wide range of cultural, social, and educational contexts across France—provide me with a privileged, subjective, and in-depth observatory of the cultural sector in France.
This sector is weakened by its position, often deemed “non-essential” by many political leaders, by the competition from digital platforms in cultural practices, as well as by challenges and obstacles related to the difficulty of establishing interdisciplinary collaborations and the scarcity of evaluations, which are often poorly conducted and instrumentalized.
My observatory allows me to identify dynamics that work, as well as difficulties I observe. Here, I propose to share my analyses, methods, and suggestions, hoping they may prove useful. My goal is to contribute to a stronger cultural sector in the future, as I believe that defending a cultural sector funded by taxpayers’ money holds the potential for emancipation, the development of freedoms, democracy, and the capacity to act—in a way that is fundamentally different from what private actors produce.
This is possible if there is no hypocrisy, and in my view, it comes at the cost of a commitment to lucidity and self-questioning, a choice to deconstruct representations, and perhaps to challenge certain privileges and systems of domination.
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The Fertile Margin
Reframe cultural and therapeutic practices within the current reality, where digital culture has become the dominant culture.
Publicly funded culture has become marginal in the face of digital practices. Rather than lamenting this, this article proposes to embrace that (…) -
Growing Up in Cultural Contempt
When the Emancipation Sector Manufactures Domination: A Sociological Analysis of an Intimate Experience
Contempt is not an accident of the cultural system; it is its fuel. What François Dubet analyzes on a societal scale, I experienced from childhood (…) -
What Artistic Discourse Reveals About Itself
A semiological analysis of a performance program text, when the talk about art speaks primarily of power.
A flyer distributed to audience members before a show may seem like nothing more than a mediation tool. Linguistic analysis reveals something (…) -
The Dramatization of Mistrust
When cultural venues stage the opposite of their own rhetoric.
An evening at the theater in a left-leaning city reveals a troubling paradox: the welcoming procedures produce exactly the opposite of the (…) -
What we avoid seeing when we defend culture
When young people are forced to go to the theater under threat of sanction, the promised emancipation can become suffered oppression.
Calls to defend funding for arts and cultural education are multiplying in the face of budget cuts. While these commitments are legitimate, they (…) -
The Representation of One’s Cultural Role
What the Association of French Mayors survey reveals about the cultural imaginary of local authorities.
What do we presuppose when we speak of “audiences distant from culture”? The AMF survey, read as an anthropological document, unveils the (…) -
For a Permanent Cultural Transformation
Moving beyond political infantilization to rebuild our institutions.
Faced with budget cuts in arts education, cultural actors appeal to those in power. This posture of supplication reveals, in my view, a dead end. (…) -
Is Culture Serving the Public?
Reflections on the dead ends of French cultural policy.
Do the 4 billion euros of the national culture budget truly serve the general interest? This question deserves to be asked pointedly, as budget (…) -
The True False Cultural Freedom
When defending creative freedom masks a corporatist conflict.
Faced with recent film deprogrammings by elected officials from various political sides, a collective statement expresses outrage at political (…) -
The Hypocrisy of Cultural Actors’ Independence
When the fear of political alternation reveals the unspoken truths of the French cultural sector.
Cultural actors have been regularly mobilizing for some time against an alleged threat to their programming and creative freedom. But does this (…) -
The False Public-Private Debate in the Cultural Sector
What is at stake in cultural policies is not the public-private opposition, but a transformation in what we expect from culture.
The rhetoric of scarcity masks deliberate political choices. Deconstructing the false public-private debate allows us to think differently about (…) -
The Free Institution
Opening spaces for creation outside the logics of cultural domination.
For thirty-five years, in response to the systems of domination that structure the cultural field, I have been proposing an alternative approach: (…) -
Why Are Cultural Actors So Fragile?
A plea for a democratic refoundation of cultural institutions in the face of political arbitrariness.
From Arcadi in Île-de-France in 2018 to the Agence culturelle Grand Est in 2025, cultural agencies are disappearing into indifference. Beyond the (…) -
Social Networks and Cultural Institutions: Breaking the Strategic Deadlock
Towards a digital policy that renounces communication in favor of citizen empowerment.
Local authorities are massively investing in their presence on social networks without questioning the relevance of this approach, and are (…) -
Beyond Mobilizing Audiences: Building Democratic Narratives
Rethinking the link between cultural institutions and citizens through collective storytelling.
Cultural structures struggle to mobilize audiences. Rather than perfecting communication strategies, I explore here a different path: that of (…) -
On the Fragility of Corporatism
When the defense of cultural privileges masquerades as freedom of expression.
The recent condemnation of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region has aroused enthusiasm among performing arts professionals. Yet, this provisional legal (…) -
The connected audience
Rethinking cultural participation through building connections.
Cultural attendance does not depend on communication but on the bond woven between people and cultural offerings. This prior relationship (…) -
Culture and politics: the forgotten lesson of sanitary totalitarianism
Reflections on the submission of the cultural sector in the face of authority.
In 2025, the French cultural sector is alarmed by the rise of the Rassemblement National. However, its behavior during the Covid period reveals a (…) -
Rethinking the digital content strategy of cultural institutions
For a web presence that prioritizes editorial authority over social media dispersion.
Cultural institutions would benefit from concentrating their efforts on producing reference content rather than maintaining a dispersed presence (…) -
The artistic relationship with the audience
The paradoxical intimacy of live streams on social media.
Starting from the Belgian pop duo Candeur Cyclone on social media, I explore the dialectic of contemporary artistic encounters. Questioning our (…) -
The Non-Institutional Cultural Institution
For a citizen reappropriation of creation.
Rethinking culture beyond institutional walls: how spontaneous practices redefine our relationship with creation and question established cultural (…) -
The Accelerated Eye
Manifesto for a new ecology of the gaze.
What if speed were not the enemy of culture, but the instrument of a new form of sensitive intelligence? A radical reappropriation of our right to (…) -
The myth of recognition through cultural democratization
Rethinking artistic value beyond systems of domination.
Artistic recognition is less about talent than about a social game that some refuse to participate in. A reflection on alternative paths to (…) -
The Misguided Debate on Funding Cuts for Culture
Rethinking the Role of Public Funding Beyond the Numbers
In 2025, debates over funding cuts for culture are heating up, following unprecedented reductions in public subsidies and a political shift in (…) -
For a narrative revolution of territories
The urgency of a horizontal cultural democracy.
What if true cultural power resided in the stories we write, daily, from our positions, with our words? Each territory produces a narrative. Not (…) -
Implementing cultural dissemination
Towards a decentralized and participatory cultural network.
Faced with the crisis of cultural democratization and a growing disengagement of public action in the cultural domain, new forms of artistic (…) -
Culture and political power: from a marriage of convenience to a consummated divorce
From Louis XIV to Rachida Dati: anatomy of a rupture between subsidized culture and political legitimacy.
Culture is no longer the theater of power. Once an instrument of political influence, it now struggles to justify its public funding. How can we (…) -
What is a cultural policy? Why is culture political? And what is political in culture?
A critical approach to cultural policies through the lens of cultural rights.
All culture is political because it imposes rules of belonging and worldviews. Exploring this dimension illuminates the democratic stakes of (…) -
Dilapidation of resources in supply logic
For a democratic revolution of cultural practices.
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, (…) -
Formalizing the informal
Informality, essential to learning, resists structure while calling for it. How to tame it.
The absence of informal aspects in distance learning forces us to rethink its fundamental nature. This constraint becomes a laboratory for (…) -
Towards a distributed cultural sector
Hypotheses on the commons and digital diversity.
What if digital cultures showed us how to build the commons through distribution rather than centralization? This hypothesis invites us to rethink (…) -
France’s cultural sector faces the urgent need for a rethink
From 1959 to 2025, history repeats itself... in reverse.
French cultural sector funding is crumbling. Malraux’s “colonial” heritage (1959) is obsolete in the face of digital technology and political (…) -
Cultivating digital sovereignty
For a democratic reclaiming of our digital spaces.
Faced with our growing dependence on tech giants, digital sovereignty is becoming a major democratic challenge. It’s time to act collectively. The (…) -
Cultural investigation with artificial intelligence
Towards an open, non-directive methodology for revealing the unexpected.
How can we transcend the limitations of traditional cultural surveys? By combining spontaneous dialogues and AI analysis, a new approach could (…) -
Corporate memory at the service of cultural rights
Rethinking the relationship between cultural venues and people.
Cultural institutions, through their failure to collect and care for data, forget those they welcome, denying their dignity. This amnesia (…) -
Towards voluntary evaluation of cultural projects
For “cultural prevention” policies.
The subsidized cultural sector is going through a crisis of legitimacy after betraying its democratic values. I believe that a refoundation (…) -
Welcoming radicalized people to cultural venues
For a truly inclusive cultural democracy.
Do cultural venues filter their audiences, consciously or unconsciously, according to criteria of radicalism? This question reveals our (…) -
Cultural venues and social networks
How to turn audiences into ambassadors rather than chasing followers.
Cultural venues are on social media out of obligation, without a clear strategy or convincing results. We need to rethink their presence: no (…) -
Documentation and artificial intelligence
Rethinking professional practices.
Generative AI can profoundly enrich our professional practices. To exploit their potential for constructive synthesis and analysis, we need to (…) -
For a virtuous dispersal of the cultural sector
The end of traditional cultural influence.
The cultural sector is going through a major crisis that reveals a paradigm shift. In my opinion, we must now cultivate culture everywhere, in all (…) -
The marginality of cultural institutions
Lucidity of a paradigm shift.
Traditional cultural institutions, once central, have become marginal in the face of digital practices that now dominate citizens’ attention. This (…) -
On the role of artists
For a politics of the artist.
The political role of the artist is never neutral. Whether they want it or not, their social position and aesthetic choices reflect an engagement, (…) -
Primary and secondary cultural practices
For a cultural dialectic of public proposals.
Daily cultural practices (internal) are underestimated compared to external cultural offerings, yet the latter are secondary in people’s lives. (…) -
Re-engaging France’s public cultural sector as a good corporate citizen
Avenues of action for a permanent future.
Facing budget cuts, the public cultural sector must reconnect with its democratic mission. Beyond corporatism, professionals must strengthen their (…) -
Evolving forms of artistic creation
An anthropological reflection on the forms of subsidized artistic creation.
Subsidized art must distinguish itself from the commercial sector through a fundamentally democratic approach, favoring shared experience over (…) -
Beyond walls: video as a vehicle for cultural democracy
When digital mediation transforms the relationship between citizens and heritage.
Video in museums represents a challenge of cultural mediation and the democratization of heritage. In the digital age, it transforms the (…) -
Legitimizing unfamiliar cultural practices
Anthropology of the future.
To foster intercultural dialogue, we need to legitimize cultural practices that are unknown to us, without ranking them above our own. This (…) -
Putting Artificial Intelligence to good use in the cultural sector
Methodological approaches.
By 2025, it seems essential to enable employees and stakeholders in the cultural sector to share the challenges of AI within their professional (…) -
Overcoming the fragility of public funding for culture
Anthropological point of view, to sketch out future paths.
Public funding for culture is currently perceived as being under considerable threat, and so the cultural sector seems to be in an extremely (…) -
Systematize mutual discoveries between cultural players
Removing obstacles to cooperation.
Common-sense proposal for better mutual understanding among cultural actors in the same territory. Why don’t we know each other well enough?In (…) -
Pour une robustesse coopérative des projets culturels
Réflexion sur les modalités de coopération territoriale et d’évaluation.
Pour que les projets culturels puissent trouver pleinement leur sens social et devenir plus robustes face aux attaques politiques qui les jugent « (…) -
“Donotdo”
Methodological concept of setting the world in motion.
The neologism “donotdo”, which I develop here, describes the capacity we have to set the world in motion at great depth, to transform it in a way (…) -
New directions
A film by Emmanuel Vergès and Benoît Labourdette (1’25s, 2021).
"What if we gave ourselves new directions by seeking new points of view?Text by Emmanuel Vergès.Direction, image, sound by Benoît (…) -
Balance and supports
A method for the sustainability of projects.
Based on the way the human body balances itself, for a sustainable approach to project management.Observation of nature is often very good (…) -
Build antifragility for cultural projects
Methodological proposal.
What methodology should be adopted to build cultural projects that have the capacity to tame uncertainty and thus become more deeply rooted in (…)
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Helping professionals design new types of projects adapted to the needs of young people Laboratory for an original training and project development program.
In the face of young people’s indifference toward institutional culture, I propose exploring an innovative training framework aimed at helping (…) -
The marginality of cultural institutions Lucidity of a paradigm shift.
Traditional cultural institutions, once central, have become marginal in the face of digital practices that now dominate citizens’ attention. This (…) -
Cultural Rights and Digital Discoverability For a cultural policy adapted to digital spaces.
Faced with the failure of many institutional digital cultural strategies, cultural rights and its corollary cultural democracy seem to me to be (…) -
What digital technology is doing to the cultural sector Food for thought.
Digital technology has now become one of the essential components of our living environment. How does it change our lifestyles and our (…) -
To make culture - From fathers to peers Collective book under the direction of Pierre Brini and Emmanuel Vergès. Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2021.
Findings, analyses and proposals to make cultural policies evolve towards the redefinition of their meaning in the contemporary world, towards (…)
