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 non-political 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 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 Notable Absentee
There are three reasons why most political figures don’t have much to say about culture during campaigns. The first is that it is an issue that rarely divides the public, unlike traffic jams, urban planning, or the commercial decline of downtown areas. The reason it is not a divisive issue 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 a few rare exceptions, the opposition has little interest in focusing the debate on what is 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 DEPS/Ministry of Culture data, Author provided
Cultural hubs are as bold in their words as they are timid in their actions. 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 more or less fulfilled: to complete 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 noted 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 “soft 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 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 peri-urban areas, which generally lack the resources for professional specialization, and where the purpose of cultural action is combined—often successfully—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-sectorization can be interpreted as a sign of culture’s (its intrinsic value) waning importance within the spectrum of public policy. But it may also hold the promise of renewal centered on new uses and values of art in society.
On the political spectrum, what sets these elections apart is, in particular, the possibility of victory for 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 euphemistic tactics, speak only of beautifying the streets and preserving heritage to highlight their cultural distinctiveness—a distinction that has become relative in their program (in practice, it’s an entirely different story).
At the other end of the spectrum, however, new criticisms of this grand narrative of municipal cultural policy are beginning to emerge. These criticisms target grandiose, expensive events that are concentrated into 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 promotes 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 study 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, incidentally, would be logical given the multi-level funding structure of these institutions—contrasts with the fact that audiences tend to be quite localized. This is a widespread phenomenon. For example, major festivals (more than four days, more than 70,000 attendees, more than 50 concerts)—which, par excellence, emphasize their “reach”—have long shown a disconnect between their internationalized lineup 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 in Toulouse, an opera audience in Lyon, and a dance audience in Montpellier emerged—and, more generally, how the cultural and artistic scenes specific 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 planning, 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 desire 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 endowed with 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.