What role does culture play in municipal elections?
Once again this year, it seemed as though nothing was going to happen. The debates between political and apolitical municipal candidates once again appeared to avoid any mention of culture, in a sort of continuation of previous elections, including the most recent presidential election.
Emmanuel Négrier, University of Montpellier
At the time, the National Federation of Local Authorities for Culture (FNCC) had criticized a “weak” consensus on culture—a topic that drew little criticism but gave rise to few innovative projects. To understand why this situation may be changing, we must examine the unique moment we are currently facing. Let’s therefore review the reasons for not discussing culture during a campaign, and then the reasons for bringing it up in the 2020 campaign.
The One Who Was Missing
There are three reasons why most political figures have little to say about culture during campaigns. The first is that it is an issue that does not divide the public, unlike traffic congestion, urban planning, or the commercial decline of downtown areas. The reason it is not divisive is that it relates to a positive view of politics, which is often credited to the incumbent. This is a far cry from the 1970s and 1980s, when the new urban middle class expressed its frustration by demanding a cultural policy that, at the time, did not really exist. Aside from rare exceptions, opposition parties have little interest in focusing the debate on issues that are positively associated with city life.
The second reason is that it is extremely difficult to envision any room for maneuver to plan other cultural initiatives. Admittedly, there is the possibility of transferring responsibility for cultural management from the municipal level to the intermunicipal level. The following diagram shows that, with a few exceptions, the central city within metropolitan areas continues to bear the bulk of the responsibility in this area.
Author’s analysis based on data from DEPS/Ministry of Culture, Author provided
Cultural hubs are as bold in words as they are timid in action. One reason for this is that the undeniable success of cities’ cultural facilities and events goes hand in hand with a growing shortage of organizations. This is a very old economic law, known as Baumol’s law: contrary to the theory of economies of scale (the bigger it is, the less it costs relatively), in the performing arts, the more activity grows, the more it costs—even when, “a victim of its own success,” the same concert is repeated twice. Yet in most local governments today, the focus is more on cost-cutting than on investing in sectors that, more than others, depend on public subsidies.
The third reason, finally, is the impression shared by many elected officials (except, no doubt, those in the Ministry of Culture) that the promise of public cultural policies has been largely fulfilled: completing the catalog of facilities and labels, the list of which has been broadly proposed by the Ministry of Culture since the 1970s. As early as the 1990s, Bernard Latarjet observed that France’s regional cultural network was effective, if not yet complete. Thus, culture would no longer be a subject of debate, since the struggle waged on its behalf had finally secured it a legitimate place. It would be time to move on to other matters.
Breaking Away from the Weak Consensus
However, two factors calling this “tenuous consensus” into question have emerged during the term now coming to an end. On the public policy front, recent years have seen a genuine push to revitalize cultural policies, supported in particular by recent laws (Law No. 2015-991 of August 7, 2015, on the new territorial organization of the Republic; Law No. 2016-925 of July 7, 2016, on freedom of creation, architecture, and heritage), for example by recognizing the concept of cultural rights.
The range of cultural policies has been expanded to include new initiatives and focal points. These are often driven by a desire to break down barriers between culture, the local community, education, the environment—and no longer just between culture, the economy, and social issues. This is particularly true of regional cultural projects in rural or suburban areas, which generally lack the resources for professional specialization, and where the purpose of cultural action is combined—often fortunately—with goals of economic development or enhancing residential appeal. This is also true of joint initiatives combining health policies and artistic interventions, which Chloé Langeard, Françoise Liot, and Sarah Montero examine in greater detail.
This de-sectoralization can be interpreted as a sign of culture’s (its intrinsic value) waning importance within the public policy landscape. But it may also hold the promise of renewal centered on new ways of engaging with and valuing art in society.
On the political spectrum, what makes these elections particularly noteworthy is, first, the possibility of a victory by far-right candidates, skillfully cast in the mold of parochial local populism. The second is the emergence of citizen-led slates calling for a municipal-level overhaul of the local agenda. The first of these two forces is virtually silent on this issue today. The Front National slates, with their strategy of euphemism, speak only of beautifying the streets and preserving heritage to highlight their cultural distinctiveness—a distinction that has become relative in their campaign rhetoric (in practice, it’s an entirely different story).
At the other end of the spectrum, however, new criticisms of this epic chapter in municipal cultural policy are beginning to emerge. These criticisms are directed at grandiose, expensive events that are concentrated over a short period of time, such as those staged by the Royal de Luxe theater company in Nantes or Toulouse.
In the rhetoric of the Greens and in the statements of municipalist and participatory political groups—such as “Nous Sommes” in Montpellier, for example—we see the emergence of a critique of an elitist metropolitan influence that has allegedly developed at the expense of a culture of community, service, and social or grassroots access:
“We want a city that supports amateur artistic and cultural activities, the work of artists, and community projects led by residents and organizations […] We reject a two-tiered, elitist culture. We reject the overfunding of an inaccessible, capitalist culture.”
A New Era for Culture
What can be said about these criticisms? First, they are paradoxical: any survey of attendance at so-called “outreach” institutions (municipal libraries with a regional focus, national opera houses and orchestras, national theater centers, etc.) shows just how dominant the local audience is. The rhetoric of “outreach”—which would, incidentally, be logical given the multi-level funding structure of these institutions—contrasts with the fact that audiences tend to be fairly localized. This is a widespread phenomenon. For example, major festivals (lasting more than four days, attracting more than 70,000 spectators, and featuring more than 50 concerts)—which, par excellence, emphasize their “reach”—have long exhibited a disconnect between their internationalized lineups and their regionalized audiences. Regional artists account for less than one-third of the lineup, while regional and local audiences make up nearly two-thirds of the total attendance.
But above all, despite their vagueness, these criticisms signal a new era for culture. While cultural policies have not yet run their course, they have nonetheless completed a phase of their development marked by a “neo-Keynesian” approach to supply: facilities were built in areas where demand did not yet exist; this mismatch, the result of productive investment, was gradually resolved as demand emerged in response to the supply. This is how, for example, a circus audience emerged in Toulouse, an opera audience in Lyon, and a dance audience in Montpellier—and, more generally, how the cultural and artistic scenes unique to a city or metropolis flourished, as Charles Ambrosino and Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux demonstrate.
This phase had multiple effects, including the emergence of professional cultural communities in cities, departments, and regions. But today, demand is tending to break free from the gentle constraints of supply. Where are new artistic movements emerging today? Notably in cooperatives, fab labs, and cultural “third places” whose missions are at once artistic, economic, civic, and political.
The causes championed are social, urban, environmental, and cultural in nature. What is their place within the framework of public cultural policy? Marginal—often negotiated at the intersection of cultural, economic, social, and neighborhood budgets. Between this emerging cultural scene and the major institutions of artistic excellence and recognized status, the disparity is glaring and dialogue is limited. It is precisely here that a renewed debate on municipal cultural policies will take place. Should we continue to treat excellence and emerging culture unequally and separately? What bridges can we build between the two? How can we reconcile the aspiration for greater proximity in cultural action with the positive otherness without which cultural policy becomes stale?
This—still tentative—emancipation of demand from the dictates of supply is good news. In a field as ill-defined as culture, public policy cannot be content with a single, stable scope or paradigm. It must constantly reinvent its boundaries and the multiple meanings that citizens, all possessing equal dignity, ascribe to it in a democracy.
Emmanuel Négrier, CNRS Research Director in Political Science at CEPEL, University of Montpellier, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.