Art, Political Engagement and Public Action

Abstract

Cultural public action has progressively allowed diverging views on art and culture, one universalist and linking innovation to democratisation, the other, differentialist and relativist, advocating a non-hierarchisable plurality of artistic forms. Whathappens to these differences when it comes to public cultural initiatives and the politicisation of the artistic sphere? One of the conundrums in cultural policy is the discrepancy between the artist as an innovator and the public at large. This discrepancy can be seen from both the demand side (supporting democratisation) and from the supply side (supporting creation).This discrepancy has been the object of an ‘aristocratic’ and pessimistic defence (Baudelarian modernity) and of politico-aesthetic rationalisation (the avant-garde). In both cases, it raises the question of the divergence between the dynamics of creation and the dynamics of consumption. This divergence testifies to the constant paradoxes that arise in identifying innovation with progressive social and political emancipation. The irony is that it is the upper classes that lend strongest support to artistic audacity yet art movements are ideologically and politically committed to opposing domination by the bourgeoisie. The duality of the value of originality in art — the aristocratic heroism of the non-conformist innovator versus the democratic individualism of the expressive artist — reveal two diverging positions in terms of the politicisation of Art and which are now superimposed in this paradox.