How does our sense of legitimacy shape our cultural experience? Let us shed light on the social and political dimensions of artistic presence, beyond mere aesthetic reception.
Inner legitimacy as a condition of experience
The question of presence is intimately bound up with that of the legitimacy one grants oneself to receive an experience. Imagine a spectator in a theatre, someone who has paid full price for their seat, surrounded by professionals they perceive as privileged, because those professionals got in free of charge, ostentatiously, walking past them instead of queueing. If this person perceives themselves as the victim of a social injustice, as the only one funding a system that ignores and despises them, their experience of the theatre will most likely be altered, for it may be difficult for them to see past this prism of their entry into the venue. Conversely, someone who fully inhabits their own legitimacy, who does not feel despised, regardless of the price paid, may live a radically different experience when confronted with the same work.
Moreover, I do not wish to establish any hierarchy between these two experiences. Indeed, the experience of injustice can itself become foundational, as Jacques Rancière suggests in The Emancipated Spectator (2008):
“Emancipation begins when the opposition between looking and acting is called into question, between those who know and those who do not know, those who are capable and those who are not.”
“There is no art of emancipation; there are only situations in which each person’s capacity to see and to say, to think and to act, is put to the test.”
This confrontation with inequality can catalyse genuine political engagement, transforming the feeling of exclusion into a driving force for reflection and collective action.
My argument might seem to fall into a relativism that would deny the intrinsic value of artistic work. It does nothing of the sort. I fully recognise the quality of the works and the labour of the artists. I maintain, however, that the experience lived by spectators goes far beyond the mere aesthetic reception of a work, for it is embedded in a social and political context that profoundly modifies its perceived value. As Nathalie Heinich also points out in The Paradigm of Contemporary Art (2014):
“The reception of a work never takes place in a vacuum, but within a context of norms, expectations, social positions and shared narratives.”
To deepen this reflection on aesthetic experience, John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), insists on the lived unity of artistic experience and on its relational dimension. Here are several significant excerpts:
“An experience has a unity that gives it its name: that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variety of its constituent parts.”
“Artistic experience, in its fullness, is an integration and an organisation of the elements of everyday life which, through form and meaning, become a living whole. It is not an interruption of life, but an intensification of its rhythms and its meanings.”
“The work of art, in its realisation, is not separate from ordinary human experience: it is a clarification and an intensification of that experience. Art, thus understood, is not a luxury, but a necessity for giving meaning and unity to our existence.”
Dewey thus emphasises that aesthetic experience is not a mere aggregate of sensations or impressions, but a living whole, structured by a quality of its own that binds its different moments together. This approach resonates particularly with the diversity of cultural experiences described above: what counts is not only the work or the event, but the way it fits into the continuity of our experience, and the way it connects the social, the political and the intimate.
Context as a revealer: art through the prism of the social
Joshua Bell’s experiment in 2007 is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. This virtuoso violinist, playing incognito in the Washington metro on his 3.5-million-dollar Stradivarius, collected only 32 dollars in 45 minutes, largely ignored by the passers-by. The same pieces, performed with the same technical excellence, were filling sold-out concert halls in the same period. This experiment, documented by the Washington Post (Weingarten, 2007), reveals that the passers-by, pressed by their daily obligations, did not grant themselves the legitimacy to be spectators, to offer themselves the presence to themselves needed to take in the aesthetic and emotional richness of the musical performance they were walking past.
Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (1979), sheds light on this mechanism:
“The relation to the work of art is never immediate; it presupposes a whole labour of acquiring the instruments of perception, which is itself the product of frequenting works of art and of familiarity with cultural codes.”
“Culture functions as symbolic capital, whose possession or deprivation structures social relations.”
This idea thus extends to the question of social exclusion. The point is not to make the passers-by or the spectators feel guilty, but to recognise that all experiences, whether marked by inclusion or by exclusion, have a value of their own. At the Avignon Festival, for example, there is no hierarchy to be drawn between those who are entitled to enter the prestigious “bar du In” and those who are turned away from it. The feeling of exclusion, often violent, reveals the implicit social hierarchies that hinder democracy. Richard Sennett, in Respect in a World of Inequality (2003), argues that:
“Experiences of social exclusion, painful as they are, can catalyse an awareness of structural inequalities.”
Reinventing cultural participation: the example of the Avignon Festival
Let us stay with the Avignon Festival, the largest theatre festival in the world, which has existed since 1947. The streets teem with actors handing out flyers, explaining their shows, looking for their audience. If one chose to live the festival solely through dialogue with these artists, which is what they ardently wish for, one would gain access to an unsuspected richness: the testimonies of passionate professionals, keys to understanding their artistic worlds, glimpses of their creative and economic challenges, and so on. This experience would be no less enriching than attending the shows themselves. This experience, accessible without paying the price of a ticket, is as enriching as listening to a radio interview with a director. It would simply be a different experience.
And in a single Avignon Festival, one could gather enough material to write a thesis on the state of dramatic art, an undertaking every bit as captivating as attending the shows themselves! Indeed, in this context, even a show judged a “failure” can become the support for fascinating exchanges with its creators about theatrical art, about the impossibility of succeeding at everything, about the tensions between artistic ambition and practical constraints, for example. Through dialogue with its creators, profound reflections on the theatre can come to light. Peter Brook, in The Empty Space (1968), supports this idea:
“A failed show can be more revealing than a success, for it exposes the fragilities, the ambitions and the tensions inherent in the creative act, offering direct access to the essence of theatre.”
Another perspective linked to these questions is that of Augusto Boal, who, in Theatre of the Oppressed (1974), insists on the importance of direct interactions: “Theatre lies not only in the performance, but in the dialogues it gives rise to, transforming spectators into actors of their own experience.” To which I would add: “inside the auditorium or outside it”.
To those who would object that these artists would not have time for such exchanges, I reply that they would on the contrary be delighted to meet someone genuinely interested in their work, they who spend their days trying to catch the attention of over-solicited passers-by.
And to go further, even someone who chose to remain cloistered in their hotel room for the whole duration of the festival would not be excluded from the experience. The hum of the celebrating city, the particular energy given off by this cultural effervescence, the unique context created by this concentration of art would turn their stay into a singular experience, incomparable to any other time spent shut away in a room elsewhere.
This encounter is not confined to performance venues; it inhabits the whole of social space during these moments of collective cultural intensity.
