To reduce inequalities in access to culture, the community must finance major facilities, but also support artistic creation and its dissemination throughout the territory, and carry out ambitious school initiation programs. Under certain conditions, “culture vouchers” are also useful. The proposals of sociologist Philippe Coulangeon.
In terms of democratization of access to culture, the results of the last 60 years are quite mixed. The policies implemented have contributed to reducing territorial divides in access to cultural offerings. Data from surveys on the practices of French people from the Ministry of Culture thus indicate, since the 1970s, a reduction in gaps. In terms of social inequalities themselves, the impact of these measures appears much more modest. Overall, social disparities in access to culture remain fairly stable, when they do not even tend to increase. This is the case, for example, of listening to classical music: this practice concerns an increasingly small and elderly audience, within which the weight of the educated upper classes is increasing.
If this observation of inertia can be partly attributed to the modesty or poor distribution of resources allocated to policies for the democratization of culture, the relative failure of these policies calls into question the doctrine on which they are inspired. Based on a very unilateral conception of reducing gaps in access to so-called “learned” culture, this doctrine clashes with developments in society.
School massification brings to the benches of middle and high schools, and increasingly to those of universities, young people from backgrounds far removed from the repertoires [ 1 ] of academic culture, who are also bearers of tastes, habits and references that compete with school culture and create a new youth culture. This is also at the heart of the extension of the influence of the culture and media industry (Amazon, Netflix, Disney, etc.) which primarily targets these age groups. Educational massification and cultural massification are thus partly linked and contribute to reducing the boundary between scholarly and popular repertoires. Whether it is films, music or shows for example, the products of the cultural industry are now present throughout society, including among the most culturally elitist social categories, which are also today today, big consumers. Globalization and the intensification of exchanges of goods and cultural content encourage the encounter of other cultures.
Under these conditions, the cultural privilege of the upper classes today resides as much, if not more, in their ability to handle the variety of repertoires, scholarly and popular, local and cosmopolitan, than in their sole familiarity with traditional forms of culture. scholarly”. This even tends to decline more sharply among the upper classes who were once closest to it. For example, book reading, which remains more intensive among graduates than among non-graduates, among senior executives than among workers, suffers a more pronounced decline over time among the former than among the latter.
We could conclude that there is a paradoxical form of democratization following the disaffection of elites for practices that were once the most socially distinctive. This would be to neglect the no less distinctive power today of the forms of cultural eclecticism which have just been mentioned. The culture of the “honest man [ 2 ] ” is no longer confused with that of the classical humanities [ 3 ] , but articulates it with multiple borrowings from popular cultures and world cultures. But this diversity of tastes, practices and repertoires is much more pronounced among the upper educated classes than among the working classes. As a result, contemporary forms of cultural disqualification do not only concern the distance from “legitimate” culture, which mass education nevertheless tends to attenuate, but, also and undoubtedly, more little varied and socially marked practices. This is the meaning of the metaphor of “omnivore” and “univore” [ 4 ] popularized by the American sociologist Richard Peterson in the early 1990s [ 5 ] .
What emancipatory horizon?
All of these developments significantly complicate the development and implementation of policies to reduce cultural inequalities, which navigate between two pitfalls. On the one hand, the temptation to put everything into perspective runs the risk, in the name of the equal dignity granted to the variety of practices, of locking everyone within the narrow limits of their own cultural repertoires and thus losing any emancipatory aim. : “learned” or eclectic culture for the elites, commercial culture for the working classes, youth culture for the young, etc. On the other hand, the pursuit of policies based on a narrow definition of legitimate repertoires obscures the redefinition of a cultural privilege today based much more on the variety of tastes and practices. The emancipatory horizon of cultural policy cannot thus be reduced to the democratization of access to “learned” culture even if, in this area, much remains to be done. It must also allow as many people as possible to access this cultural diversity.
In this context, reducing inequalities in access to culture must be based on three pillars. The first remains that of major cultural creation and dissemination facilities (museums, national stages, etc.) which retain an eminent role throughout the national territory, but whose financing could be more conditional than it is. today to conquer new audiences.
The second pillar concerns all the intermediary structures of cultural creation and dissemination anchored in the life of neighborhoods and territories, the only ones capable of bringing the encounter of diversified artistic forms to life on a daily and continuous basis. We must strengthen the public support that is essential for them.
The third pillar is that, neglected for too long, of artistic and cultural education, in a country where cultural policy has largely turned its back, under the Fifth Republic , on that of education. The democratization of culture is above all a matter of mediation between works and their audiences. This task calls for the strengthening of a partnership between educational establishments and cultural establishments which cannot be reduced to preferential pricing or the organization of sessions dedicated to school audiences. We are thinking here of the co-piloting of long-term educational projects around artistic and cultural activities involving participating artists, on the model of the “Ten months of school and opera” program of the Paris Opera or the “Orchestras à l’école” program, almost everywhere in France. Partnerships of this type could feature more systematically on the agenda of public cultural policies, both nationally and locally.
Supply logic and demand logic
More broadly, the effectiveness of policies to reduce inequalities in access to culture calls for rethinking the balance between a logic of support for the offer, which remains prevalent in the French conception of cultural policies, and a logic of support demand. This can be done through “culture checks” for example, but this difficult option to implement, as recent examples show, in Italy and France with the “Culture pass [ 6 ] ”, can appear as a boon for the behemoths of the cultural industry and the digital giants. In this case, the community finances cultural democratization less than the profits of these large companies. This is despite the safeguards placed on the use of sums distributed to young consumers, only part of which can be spent with major cultural and digital distribution brands. This type of system therefore requires fairly strict supervision of the nature of authorized expenditure.
The main justification for cultural supply policies is in fact the economic fragility of the production and distribution of works and repertoires which would not necessarily meet sufficient demand to ensure their survival if they were left to the laws of the market. In this sense, we clearly see the risk on the quality of the offer – we must also be able, for example, to finance innovative works, by very little-known artists, etc. – what a complete shift towards a predominant logic of supporting demand would entail. The fact remains that this dimension cannot remain the blind spot of cultural policies. This also serves as a reminder that the reduction of cultural inequalities cannot replace that of social inequalities on which it is largely dependent. If, for many of our fellow citizens, culture remains a luxury, it is also and above all because it is economically inaccessible to them.
Philippe Coulangeon Sociologist, research director at CNRS, member of the Sociological Observatory of Change at Sciences Po.
[ 1 ] Cultural repertoire: details of a person's cultural practices.
[ 2 ] Honest man: designated during the Enlightenment a bourgeois or noble recognized for his general culture.
[ 3 ] Classical humanities: scholarly knowledge in literature, ancient languages, arts, etc.
[ 4 ] Omnivore and univore: eating a wide variety of foods (omnivore) or only one type (univore).
[ 5 ] See “The transition to omnivorous tastes: notions, facts and perspectives”, Richard Peterson, Sociology and societies vol. 36 n°1, 2004.
[ 6 ] Credit of 300 euros in 2023, allocated to young people aged 18 for cultural activities and products.
Seen in Observatoire des Inegalites
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