Rebuilding the Democratic Function of Major Performing Arts Venues

Digital technology has made each of us a potential creator. This anthropological transformation calls for a rethinking of the political function of publicly funded performing arts, and of what their major venues could become for the people who live around them.

This article appears as I am taking part in the “Chaillot Augmenté x TMNlab, Performing Arts and Digital Environments 2026” conference (5–6 May 2026), where I will speak on a panel about the transformation of audience relationships. The reflections I offer here, however, go well beyond the scope of that event. They concern what publicly funded cultural venues are, and what they could become in a society that digital technology is transforming in depth. These are questions I have been working on for many years, and I believe they will remain relevant long after the immediate occasion that prompts their publication today.

Publicly funded performing arts venues are political places in the strongest sense of the word. Digital technology makes visible the urgent need to rebuild their democratic function, a task that cannot be reduced to a matter of simple modernisation.

Getting past the misunderstanding: digital technology is not about projecting pixels onto a stage

A great deal of current thinking about “live arts and digital environments” focuses on what technology makes possible on stage. XR, generative AI, immersive sound, transmedia forms: these explorations are legitimate, and some produce remarkable works, whose artistic value and the labour they demand from the artists engaged in them I fully respect.

I would however like to defend what I believe to be a deeper thesis: many of these proposals, however accomplished, may not sufficiently question the major anthropological shift produced by digital technology. They add technology to an apparatus, in the sense Giorgio Agamben gives the word in What Is an Apparatus? (2006): “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings”. Yet this apparatus (the proscenium stage, the stage-audience separation, the spectator assigned to passivity, the ritual of symbolic obedience) remains very largely unchanged. Digital technology inside a nineteenth-century bourgeois apparatus is not necessarily digital in any strong sense; it may amount to no more than a modernisation of the façade.

This thesis gains from being placed within a longer history. Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), showed that mechanical reproduction technologies had allowed art to free itself from central power and to reach a form of cultural democracy. Digital platforms today extend and radicalise that emancipatory movement, giving each of us the means to receive, to produce, and to circulate. It is no surprise that they destabilise the habits of publicly funded cultural venues: in their own time, the printing press of the sixteenth century, and then Wikipedia at the turn of the 2000s, were criticised with the same vehemence by the holders of established knowledge, even though they carried the seeds of the Renaissance, or of unprecedented universal access to knowledge. What these upheavals teach us is that the challenge facing cultural venues is political more than technological.

Part of the professional field does point to this concern, calling for a move away from the logic of technological fascination, and a return to more embodied artistic proposals, after a decade of innovation euphoria. I share this concern, and I would like to add some considerations about what really changes with digital technology, beyond its uses on stage.

What really changes, in fact, is the way people relate to culture. Each of us is now potentially a creator, documenting our lives, producing images, videos, narratives, circulating them, building communities of affinity, without any institutional mediation (though with the mediation of commercial digital platforms). Millions of people, every day, engage in cultural practices that pass through no publicly funded cultural venue. This is an anthropological transformation, and the cultural sector must draw its consequences from it if it wants to continue justifying its political existence and its public funding, both at the level of the works it produces and at the level of its institutional arrangements.

Digital technology is not a subject one takes sides for or against. It reconfigures more fundamental issues, relating to our relationship to presence and to creative legitimacy, and it is this reconfiguration, with its political consequences, that must be taken seriously.

Performing arts: a political project, not an extension of Versailles

We too often forget that publicly funded culture in France is a political and democratic project, which breaks with the logic of royal patronage. We are no longer in the time of Louis XIV: cultural funding is the money of the citizens, including those who proportionally pay the highest taxes. Let me recall that, when all levies are combined, the poorest people in France pay on average 50% of their income in taxes, compared to 26% for the wealthiest.

This democratic origin of funding has a direct political consequence. A democratic project must give a place to everyone, and therefore dismantle the power mechanisms that stand in the way. The first such mechanism, which materially and symbolically structures most performing arts venues, is the traditional hall, the Italian-style theatre, with its stage-audience frontality and its hierarchy of seating.

I want to be precise on this point, as it is often caricatured. I have nothing against being seated in a hall; it is pleasant, and it can be a deeply moving experience, even in the most classical setting, when an encounter takes place. I have written at length elsewhere about the work of Pippo Delbono, where something can happen within the very walls of an institutional theatre. My objection is political; it is not about the aesthetic pleasure the hall affords.

What I find problematic is what this apparatus produces when it is offered as the only possible form, assigning people to passive roles. Those who lack the required cultural background find themselves within an apparatus of domination in which they are dominated, without knowing it, and without the professionals who welcome them with the best intentions knowing it either. As Pierre Bourdieu showed in Distinction (1979), attending legitimate cultural venues functions as a mechanism for accumulating cultural capital, and this capital serves to reproduce the social hierarchy. It therefore happens that publicly funded culture, far from serving its audience in the democratic sense of the word, serves the symbolic domination exercised through the cultivated public over the non-audiences.

What major performing arts venues could become

The major theatres, national stages, and drama centres are extraordinary places: by their size, their architectural quality, the rare technical and artistic expertise they concentrate (video, lighting, sound, scenography, dramaturgy, choreography, direction), and by the level of public funding they receive, which often reaches several hundred thousand euros, sometimes several millions per year.

The question that arises is what we, collectively, do with these extraordinary resources. For the most part, we produce and present “quality” performances, in a logic that often seeks to defend itself against the erosion of funding, without always questioning the actual democratic effects this logic produces. Some productions, let us say it frankly, cost considerable sums, tour very little, and are seen by only a small number of people. Measured against the democratic purposes of public investment, this amounts to throwing money out of the window.

In professional networks attentive to these questions, it is now widely recognised that the challenge to be met is primarily organisational rather than technological. What blocks change lies in production logics, funding frameworks, professional cultures, and in the very conceptions of what art is, of what a valuable work is, of what it means “to make a work”. I share this view, and I draw from it a consequence I believe to be radical: if the challenge is organisational, then the legitimate questions the professional field asks itself (how to better host hybrid projects, how to pool resources, how to invent new professions) would gain from being preceded by a more fundamental question, the question of the very purpose of these venues: for whom, and in the service of what, do they exist?

I propose to turn the question around, and to imagine what these venues could be if we first thought of them as public resources at the service of the real cultural practices of the citizens in the digital age.

One concept seems to me essential for redefining what these venues can offer: that of experience, in the sense John Dewey gives the word in Art as Experience (1934). A film watched in a cinema hall or on a phone is not the same film in terms of lived experience. The work is the same, but the relationship the viewer has with it is profoundly transformed: leaving home, settling among others, sharing a common time and space, all of this modifies the state of reception and gives the encounter with the work a particular density. It is this dimension of shared experience that makes the irreducible specificity of the physical cultural venue, at a time when content itself circulates abundantly through other channels. Evaluating the value of a cultural project solely by how full the venues are means missing this specificity, treating the venue as a container and postulating a hierarchy between the film watched in the hall and the film watched on a phone that, in truth, hardly respects people’s cultural rights and the diversity of their relationships with art. This shift of perspective, from content to experience, seems to me structuring for everything that follows.

Here, in summary, are a few directions, not exhaustive, that I have been defending for years and that I have developed in my book Défendre la culture autrement : méthodes pour demain (Defending Culture Differently : Methods for Tomorrow) (2025):

• Open professional expertise to the creative practices of residents. The technical and artistic teams could, for part of their time, accompany the creations of those who come to film, edit, write, or choreograph their own projects. I am not thinking here only of the “audiences from the social field” brought in as small groups to tick the boxes of the social mission, but of all the citizens who have something to create and to say, and who could have access to the exceptional resources of the venue. The Studio 13/16 at the Centre Pompidou has been showing for years that this is possible, and it should, in my view, become a norm.

• Transform the venue into a resource, as much as a programming space. A beautiful theatre, with its backstage areas, workshops, control rooms, archives, can become setting, tool, raw material for creations carried by people who would otherwise never have access to such technical quality. When teenagers say “on TikTok, we would need adapted booths”, why not install them in the historic backstage corridors of the theatre? The needs of users then become sources of cultural projects co-constructed with them.

• Programme differently. Many more lightweight and improvised forms, more numerous, more frequent, reaching a greater number of people, including amateur performances on the main stages, which are in high demand from amateur performers and in no way devalue the venue. The “major” productions can continue to have their place there, when they respond to identified expectations of the territory, without constituting their sole function or the principal criterion of legitimacy. Let us move towards a thinking of art as experience, and move beyond art as object (as the latter induces an object relation which, in psychoanalytic terms, implies an unhealthy enjoyment of dominating or being dominated).

• Rethink mediation as relationship, rather than as prescription. There is no cultural venue without links. Classic institutional communication, posters, posts on social media, do not suffice to build such links, which are woven in regular encounters with people, in listening, in the co-construction of projects. This approach is demanding and slow, and requires a reorientation of the teams’ working time. It is, to my mind, the condition for these venues to remain rooted in the city.

What digital platforms teach us (and it is not how to become TikTok)

Understanding what the platforms teach us is one thing; imitating their codes in order to “meet audiences where they are” is another, which I do not defend. These lessons can serve to reinvent our own function.

What the platforms teach us first is that people want to be active in their cultural practices rather than simple spectators, and that anyone can instantly become an author or a producer of content, with no barrier to entry other than their own shyness. Culture, today, is also, and massively, this active and disintermediated culture, practised by the citizens themselves, which publicly funded institutions struggle to recognise as legitimate.

On a platform such as TikTok, the computer code itself is changing the notion of a work. When thousands of people collectively reuse, remix, and refine a choreography or a piece of music, the singular work gradually disappears behind a collective artistic experience, in which everyone is both spectator and author. The inherited paradigms that clearly distinguish the artist from their public lose part of their relevance here. This shift takes place on a massive scale, in the daily lives of billions of people, and it directly questions the relevance of our own venues: a venue that structurally maintains, through its Italian-style hall and its frontality, the separation between those who produce the work and those who receive it, can hardly present itself as a place of cultural democracy, in a society that has largely moved beyond that separation.

I have proposed a concept for thinking through this situation, that of fertile margin. Our publicly funded institutions are no longer at the centre of the cultural game, and will not return there. This margin can be experienced in two ways. It can be lived as a relegation one deplores, while endlessly demanding that our lost place be given back. It can also be assumed as a chosen place, from which we can act with more freedom and more relevance, precisely because we are no longer subject to the obligations of the centre. It is this second path that I defend. Recognising oneself in this margin is not a matter of effacement; it is a matter of recovering a capacity for invention and experimentation that the centre, now occupied by other actors, has largely lost.

Cultural institutions could draw from this shift a strategic humility, accepting this margin and making it the liveliest place of their action. This involves positioning themselves more as facilitators than as prescribers, more as resources than as authorities, more as sources of quality on which others can build their own proposals, rather than as issuers of a top-down message.

Such a direction can only enrich the role of professional artists, by replacing their work within an ecosystem in which it is better received and better shared because it enters into real dialogue with the cultural practices of the citizens, instead of standing above them. My own experience of supporting cultural teams in this direction shows me that it is fulfilling for artists, while demanding from them a rigorous questioning.

Professional gatherings as demanding democratic spaces

I often find myself being critical of the professional gatherings of the cultural sector, which sometimes operate in a closed circle, among insiders, with the risk of a corporatist reproduction of received ideas. I do believe, deeply, however, that these moments can be precious, when they are genuinely open to all, and when one can debate in them, disagree, and keep talking. What is at stake, in those moments, pertains to democracy understood in its most concrete sense: spaces where points of view confront one another without cancelling each other out.

The paradox of the apparatus: our gatherings reproduce what they criticise

We must nevertheless name a paradox I have observed for a long time, and which seems useful to put into discussion. Many of these professional gatherings, which deal precisely with the transformation of audience relationships, reproduce in their own format the very apparatus they question. Experts speak from a podium while an audience listens from the hall; questions from the audience come at the end, when there is hardly any time left. The spectacular apparatus whose effects of symbolic domination I analysed above (frontality, verticality, assignment to passivity) is also the apparatus of our professional gatherings, with the sole difference that what is welcomed on stage is not artists, but experts and heads of institutions.

This is not a fatality, and it is not the fault of any particular organiser. We are dealing with a structural temptation of our professions, a natural slope of professional gatherings, one we can correct together, from within these moments themselves, provided we become aware of it.

Shifting the apparatus from within

This calls for something simple and demanding: that those present in the room take the floor more than is planned, in order to contribute to the debate, to testify, to bring other perspectives and other experiences from other professional or civic territories. A democratic system remains democratic only on the condition that it is kept in motion. Scrupulously respecting the proposed format can sometimes, despite the best intentions, amount to letting the apparatus do its work of assignment.

I make a fraternal and demanding request to those who take part in this kind of gathering: let us not settle for the role of audience. Each of us carries field experiences, constructive disagreements, and concrete proposals, which deserve to circulate. If the gathering takes place only in a top-down register, with “great experts” who “explain life” and an audience that nods politely, we will all collectively have missed something essential.

The place of outside perspectives: a democratic necessity

There is here, it seems to me, a deeper question that goes well beyond any particular event, and which I find decisive for the democratic future of the cultural sector.

Cultural professionals need perspectives other than their own. Saying so does them no offence; I simply recognise that, engaged full-time in their practices (which is human, and normal), they often lack the distance needed to question their own assumptions. Some questions that seem secondary or even absurd to them are essential when viewed from the outside; conversely, debates that passionately occupy them sometimes remain incomprehensible, or simply indifferent, to those whom their action is meant to serve. The presence of perspectives from other fields (social, educational, scientific, technical, health-related, associative, or simply civic) is therefore not an accessory one could do without, but an irreplaceable resource for moving beyond corporatist assumptions. It is even, in my view, a condition of relevance: without it, the sector risks endlessly refining answers to questions that no one outside of it is asking any more.

I would, however, like to extend this idea in another way, which seems to me just as important. It is true that professionals do not always open themselves enough to other contributions, and one can regret it; I would nonetheless like to defend here a complementary perspective. Publicly funded culture, let me recall, is funded by taxes: it belongs to all of us, and is not only the business of the professionals who take daily charge of it. Citizens who have an opinion, an experience, a skill, a curiosity, or a concern about the way these venues operate (which is, in reality, just about everyone) can and must feel entitled to express themselves in the spaces where these questions are worked out. Professional gatherings open to the public are among these spaces, and taking part in them is less a favour granted by the organisers than a democratic right.

This reversal seems to me crucial. Waiting for professionals to “open up” their gatherings to non-professionals does not suffice: it is also up to the citizens to actively claim their right to contribute. The initial impulse for building links with new and diverse audiences, of course, falls to the professionals of the sector, whose profession and mission it is, and who must be firmly reminded of this responsibility when it is not upheld. A democratic dynamic, however, is not decreed from one side only: it is built in the actual encounter between professionals who accept to be moved, and citizens who authorise themselves to speak. Without this twofold requirement, the best intentions remain a dead letter.

Once outside people are present, there still remains the need for their words to be genuinely listened to, in a real availability to be shifted by them, and not with the condescending goodwill that silently waits for the moment to resume the prepared presentations. Only on this condition can these gatherings have a democratic reach, and not merely a communicational one, and only on this condition will outside participants come, and come back. When they sense that their presence is no more than décor, they withdraw, and the dialogue which is the very stake of these moments, between the professionals and those they are meant to serve, is reduced to a pantomime.

Reinventing rather than repairing

It is not a matter of repairing the cultural sector in small details, by adding a bit of digital here or a bit of mediation there, or by multiplying a few projects with “excluded audiences”. What I believe is necessary is to refound, or more precisely to reinvent, the political function of publicly funded performing arts in twenty-first-century France. The task is to invent the function that fits the present world, rather than to restore an older one; this, it seems to me, is what it means to create, in the strong sense of the word.

The places where we gather can be essential spaces of citizenship for democracy, and they still are too little. I believe, after decades of practice on the ground, that such a refoundation is possible, provided we accept to dismantle certain power mechanisms and certain symbolic privileges. This acceptance is demanding, and it is at this price that the cultural sector will regain a full democratic legitimacy, at a time when such legitimacy is threatened on all sides.

It is to this work of refoundation that I devote my writings, my public interventions, and my daily practice of supporting cultural teams, and I invite everyone to take their share in it, whether they are a professional or a citizen. It is our collective responsibility, and it will not happen in our stead.