What role does culture play in municipal elections?

Once again this year, it looked as if nothing was going to happen. Debates between political and apolitical municipal candidates once again seemed to avoid any reference to culture, in a sort of continuity with previous elections, including the most recent presidential ones.

Emmanuel Négrier, University of Montpellier

At the time, the Fédération nationale des collectivités territoriales pour la culture (FNCC - National Federation of Local Authorities for Culture) denounced a "soft" consensus on culture, the object of little criticism, but the subject of few innovative projects. To understand why this situation may be changing, we need to look at the particular moment we're facing. Let's take a look at the reasons for not talking about culture during a campaign, and then at the reasons for bringing it up in the 2020 campaign.

The great absentee

There are three reasons why most politicians don't have much to say about culture when campaigning. The first is that it's an area that doesn't divide people very much, as opposed to traffic jams, urban planning or the commercial desertification of city centers. If it's not so divisive, it's because it relates to a positive vision of politics, which is often credited to the outgoing elected official. This is a far cry from the 1970-1980s, when the new urban middle class expressed its frustration by demanding a cultural policy that didn 't really exist at the time. Apart from a few rare examples, the opposition has little interest in crystallizing the debate around what is positively identified with city life.

The second reason is that it is extremely difficult to envisage any room for manoeuvre when it comes to planning other cultural initiatives. Of course, there is the possibility of transferring the management of culture from the municipal level to the intercommunal level. The following diagram shows that, except in a few cases, the central city of a metropolis continues to exercise most of the responsibilities in this area.

Cultural metropolises are as valiant in word as they are timid in deed. One of the reasons for this is that the undeniable success of cultural facilities and events in cities goes hand in hand with a growing deficit 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 relatively cheaper it is), in the performing arts, the bigger the activity, the more it costs, even when, "victim of its own success", the same concert is repeated twice. And yet, in most local authorities today, the focus is more on savings than on investment in sectors that, more than others, depend on public subsidies.

The third reason is the impression shared by many elected officials (except, no doubt, those in charge of culture) of a certain completion of the promise of public cultural policies: to fill the catalog of facilities and labels, the list of which has been roughly proposed by the Ministry of Culture since the 1970s. As far back as the 1990s, Bernard Latarjet observed that France's cultural network was effective, if not complete. Culture would no longer be the subject of debate, since the fight for it had finally guaranteed it a legitimate place. It would be time to move on.

Breaking out of the soft consensus

However, two factors are challenging this "soft consensus" in the course of the current term of office. On the public policy side, recent years have brought a real discourse of revitalization of 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 the freedom of creation, architecture and heritage), recognizing, for example, the notion of cultural rights.

The catalog of cultural policies has been enriched by new objects and totems. They are often based on a desire to break down the barriers between culture, territory, education, the environment... and no longer just between culture, the economy and social issues. This is particularly true of local cultural projects in rural or peri-urban areas, which generally lack the resources for professional specialization, and where the aim of cultural action is combined - often fortunately - with objectives of economic development or residential appeal. This is also true in the case of actions combining health policies and artistic intervention, which Chloé Langeard, Françoise Liot and Sarah Montero study in greater detail.

This de-sectorization can be interpreted as a sign of the weakening of culture (its value per se) in the public policy spectrum. But it can also hold out the promise of renewal around the new uses and values of art in society.

On the political spectrum, the novelty of these elections lies in the possibility of victory for far-right candidates, skilfully cast in the local-populist mould. The second is the emergence of citizens' lists calling for a municipalist shake-up of the local agenda. The first of these two forces is virtually inaudible on this subject today. With their euphemistic tactics, the frontist lists only mention the flowering of arteries and the care given to heritage to nourish their cultural difference, which has become relative in the invocation of the program (in action, it's something else entirely).

At the other end of the spectrum, however, we're beginning to see new criticisms of this epic of municipal cultural policies. Questions are being raised about the grandiloquent, expensive and time-concentrated events, such as those put on by the Royal de Luxe company in Nantes and Toulouse.

In the speeches of the Greens, and in the comments of municipal and participative lists - such as "Nous Sommes" in Montpellier, for example - we can see the emergence of a criticism of an elitist metropolitan influence, which would have taken place to the detriment of a culture of proximity, service, social or popular access:

"We want a city that promotes amateur artistic and cultural practices, the work of artists, and collective projects led by residents and associations [...] We reject a two-tiered, elitist culture. We reject the over-financing of inaccessible, capitalist culture.

A new time for culture

What can we say about these criticisms? Firstly, they are paradoxical: any survey of attendance at so-called "radiating" facilities (regional municipal libraries, national opera houses and orchestras, national drama centers, etc.) shows the extent to which the surrounding public dominates. In contrast to the "radiant" discourse - which would be logical given the multi-level funding structure of these structures - audiences are fairly localized. This is a general phenomenon. For example, the major festivals (over four days, more than 70,000 spectators, more than 50 concerts) which, par excellence, evoke their influence, have long shown a hiatus between the internationalized line-up and regionalized audiences. Regional artists account for less than a third of the bill, while regional and local audiences account for almost two-thirds.

But above all, despite their imprecision, these criticisms are the sign of a new time for culture. While cultural policies have not yet reached the end of their road, they have nevertheless completed a phase of their existence marked by a "neo-Keynesian" approach to supply: facilities were set up in areas where there was no demand: this discrepancy, the fruit of productive investment, was gradually absorbed by a demand that responded to the call of supply. This is how, for example, a circus audience was created in Toulouse, an opera audience in Lyon, a dance audience in Montpellier, and, more generally, the development of cultural and artistic scenes specific to a city or metropolis, as Charles Ambrosino and Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux show.

This phase had multiple effects, including the creation of professional cultural milieus in cities, départements and regions. But today, demand is tending to emancipate itself from the gentle injunctions of supply. Where are today's emerging artists? Particularly in cooperatives, fab labs and cultural third places, whose vocations are at once artistic, economic, civic and political.

The causes defended are social, urbanistic, environmental and cultural. What is their place in the order of public cultural policies? Marginal, often negotiated at the crossroads of cultural and economic, social or neighborhood envelopes. Between this cultural emergence and the major institutions of artistic excellence and accreditation, the inequality is glaring and exchanges weak. This is precisely where a renewed debate on municipal cultural policies is needed. Should excellence and emergence continue to be treated separately and unequally? What bridges should be built between the two? How can we link the desire for greater proximity in cultural action with the positive otherness without which a cultural policy becomes stale?

This - still timid - emancipation of demand from the prescriptions of supply is good news. In a field as blurred as culture, public action cannot be satisfied with a single, stable perimeter or paradigm. It must constantly reinvent its boundaries and the multiple meanings given to it, in a democracy, by citizens of equal dignity.

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. Read theoriginal article.