The theatre world speaks readily of vocation, of singularity, of genius. This heroic story serves to distribute power, and it suits us: following a rebellious artist gives the feeling of being committed without risking anything, when that artist, appointed and funded by the institutions, poses them no threat at all. Here I examine how this story is made, its cost to artists, and the other path, that of cultural democracy, where art serves emancipation rather than domination.
Building the hero
There is a word that circulates a great deal in the theatre world and deserves a close look: vocation. The theatre artist is said to have a vocation. They are supposedly inhabited by something that exceeds them, that compels them, that imposes on them a path which others, those who have a trade rather than a vocation, cannot understand from within.
This notion has a history. The sociologist Nathalie Heinich, in L’élite artiste. Excellence et singularité en régime démocratique (2005), traced how, at the start of the nineteenth century, the status of the artist shifted from a professional regime, that of the studio painter working on commission like a craftsman, to a vocational regime, in which artistic practice is justified by an inner calling. In a democratic society where inequality can no longer be justified by birth, vocation makes it possible to found a new aristocracy, an elite of the gift, of singularity and of sacrifice, whose very marginality, the bohemian, the accursed artist, turns into proof of election. Heinich also observes that this status allows artists to live among the powerful who fund their works while claiming that these works owe nothing to that relationship. Vocation is therefore not a simple word of the heart; it is the cornerstone of a system of legitimation that has very concrete effects on the way power is distributed.
The cultural hero is built according to a remarkably stable pattern, whatever the period and the aesthetic. First there is singularity, what makes this artist unique, irreplaceable, the bearer of a vision that exists nowhere else. Then suffering: creation has a cost, it demands sacrifices, it exposes one to risks that others would not have the courage to take on. Then revolt, which sets the artist in tension with their time, their milieu, the conventions. And finally generosity: they share in spite of everything, they give, they offer the world what the world did not necessarily deserve.
This narrative pattern is so widespread that it has become the almost exclusive frame for speaking about artists in the media, in presentation files, in interviews. It is the story that institutions produce about their artists, and often the story that artists produce about themselves. The sociologist Marjorie Glas has shown that, in French public theatre, the heroisation of the artist went hand in hand with the marginalisation of the uninitiated; I set out her analysis in the article The spectator’s score. Jacques Rancière, in The Distribution of the Sensible (2000), helps us understand what is at stake at a more fundamental level: for him, the central political question is not who holds power, but who is visible and who is not, who has a say and who is reduced to silence. Through the heroic story, we attribute to one category of people a special capacity to see, to feel, to understand what others could not grasp on their own. And in doing so, we assign the others to a place of receivers, of beneficiaries, even of raw material that artistic genius will transform.
Protesting by proxy
If this story holds up so well, it is also because it does us a service. I think we need this heroic function because it lets us off the hook: following someone spares us from making decisions for ourselves. It is very comfortable. And the comfort is greater still when the artist presents themselves as a dissenter, because then they protest in our place. By following them, at no risk, we get the impression of being on the side of those who are politically committed, when in reality it is the opposite.
This protest is, moreover, very tightly framed. The figure is a familiar one: the rebellious artist who declares that they want to change the world, who wants people, on leaving their show, to set things alight, to divorce, to rise up, to make the revolution. Except that this artist was appointed to their position by the President of the Republic or by the Ministry of Culture, institutions which certainly have no intention of funding the revolution against themselves. Their discourse of revolt is a posture of seduction and of clear conscience, a false risk-taking, all the more effective for appearing generous. In the article A clear conscience as a system I analysed the domination that lodges itself, in spite of itself, in this kind of address.
Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello described this mechanism of absorption on a large scale in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999): the artistic critique, the one that demanded authenticity and autonomy against the world of money, was absorbed by what it criticised, which turned it into management values, creativity, the project, the network. Cultural institutions do something comparable with theatrical revolt: by programming it, funding it, celebrating it, they turn it into a label, and to absorb it is to cancel it out.
We saw this confirmed during the Covid crisis. When it became necessary to obey instructions that were at times absurd and authoritarian, these great rebels obeyed first, standing to attention, and some had the police remove people who were protesting, in their own theatres, against government policy.
Barbara Stiegler, in Il faut s’adapter (2019), reconstructed the genealogy of the neoliberal project through the opposition between Walter Lippmann, for whom populations had to be adapted by enlightened experts to a world that had become too complex for them, and John Dewey, who defended the capacity of ordinary people to understand and transform their environment collectively. The heroisation of the artist seems to me a cultural version of the Lippmannian project. The heroic artist sees what the public cannot see on its own, feels what the public will only be able to feel once exposed to their art. And the public, in return, delegates: it protests by proxy, it emancipates itself by proxy.
The legitimised rebel
The figure of the rebel protects. An artist settled into this role can transgress on stage, provoke, shock, these are the expectations of the character, and admiration for the exceptional being makes what they actually inflict on others secondary. This figure moreover combines, without difficulty, revolt on stage and submission to the power that appointed them, and between the two, often, ordinary domination over teams and those close to them.
We see it too in the support that rebel artists give one another, including when one of them is responsible not for an aesthetic transgression but for a real and judged act of violence. The solidarity of the character then prevails over the reality of the acts, even into the most odious domination. To justify this support, the separation of the man from the artist is invoked. I do not believe in it: it is the same person, and the figure of the rebel, which magnifies aesthetic transgression, also serves to excuse real violence.
An impossible norm for the majority of artists
Heroisation has a barely visible effect on the artists who are not heroised, that is, on the vast majority. Those validated by the institution at the highest level are very few, and it is they whom people come to follow. For the others, the norm is impossible: to be a real artist, one would have to have a vision, a singularity, a capacity to transgress. Some play the game and seek to heroise themselves, which produces an inflation of ego and discourse that bears little relation to the reality of the work. This shows even in the form of their shows: domineering, manipulative shows, which assume and claim themselves as such, where everything is built so that we are enlightened by the genius of the artist, by the risks they have taken, by all they have gone through in order to create. Others give up the claim to be an artist and become technicians of the show, which is another way of marginalising themselves. There are thus, in this story, two categories of artist: those who are heroic and stage themselves as such, and those who are not, who are to be despised because they supposedly take no real risks.
This ranking is maintained from training and selection onward. In the leading schools of artistic training, those admitted are told that they are the elite. Identification with the role begins there, before the first show.
Holding the role means dominating
The problem with a system is that once you are inside it, you have to maintain it, because you identify with it. The heroised artist must live up to the story that carries them, and to do so must dominate everyone else, the teams, the staff, the spectators, because the story only holds if the hierarchy holds. This domination makes possible all kinds of excesses, which the theatre’s #MeToo movement has begun to bring to light. Each person is free to do as they wish with their own posture, and each individual does what they can. But this cannot be defended collectively: the collective must not defend domination.
Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality (1973), distinguished convivial tools, which increase people’s capacity to do what they want to do, from manipulative tools, which create dependence on experts and institutions. Applied to theatre: an artist who uses their work and their presence to increase people’s capacity to create, to think, to express themselves, works with convivial tools. An artist who sets themselves up as the only one able to produce the experience that transforms lives works with manipulative tools, even with the best of intentions.
Speaking about one’s work without the posture
It is not a matter of denying that some artists have exceptional gifts, singular visions, creative capacities that set them apart. It is a matter of questioning the heroic story as the only way of accounting for what artists do, and as the only way for them to exist institutionally. One can make a very powerful show without this pretension, and without the spectators being manipulated. Humility, here, is a working position.
The band Shaka Ponk offers an example. In 2026, its singer published a long video revisiting a collaboration that dated back fifteen years, and stating publicly that it should never have existed, that the group had “picked the wrong fight”. These are artists who have had enormous success, who have great talent, and who are working publicly to de-heroise themselves, speaking of their mistakes rather than of their genius. Nothing in this statement weakens their work.
There is, moreover, a concrete benefit to not entering the role, or to leaving it. An artist who does not see themselves as a hero has no rank to hold and no image to maintain, and opens themselves to many more opportunities, possibilities, adventures, experiences. This point seems to me all the more current as the budgets of traditional cultural democratisation are falling sharply at the moment, and I dare say not without reason, because these budgets were largely oriented toward the heroic approach, which no longer holds. I am among those who defend public funding for culture, and naming this mechanism is not an argument for reducing it. There will always be a few heroes on the great stages. For the majority of artists, fortunately, it is on other, far more democratic values that there are things to build.
Detoxifying from heroisation involves one concrete and difficult thing: learning to speak about one’s work differently. Without the posture, without the vocation, without the genius. Speaking about what one is looking for, what one does not know, what has failed, what remains open. This change of discourse is not a loss; it makes artistic work visible in what it is, a work, with its gropings, its doubts, its discoveries.
This other way of being an artist has a framework in which to be thought: cultural rights, and the cultural democracy they make operative. Understanding art as a democratic process, as a space of openness and expression for everyone, and not only for a chosen few. I developed this distinction in the article Democratisation or cultural democracy : what these two words do to theatre, and the lineage of this thinking in the article John Dewey : an inspirer of cultural rights ?. This, to my mind, is the path ahead. Art long served a form of domination. It must now serve emancipation, quite simply, and this is what will increasingly be asked of it. That is why it is so important to learn to step out of heroisation.
