Paris faces deep orchestra cuts

The document from the ministery as inspected, includes also

Enfin, « mieux adapter l’offre de spectacles aux attentes du public et des collectivités » figure parmi les propositions d’évolutions.

This is: better adapting the performance offerings to audience expectations and communities. So, cultural offerings as commodities on a market, a purely commercial field where the balance between production and demand defines what happens. Obviously, this undermines any justification of subsidies by government bodies for culture, which has, in Europe, a long history of patronage because it has always been considered as something that should be protected against something like a ‘free market’, having a value that transcends market prices.

Is culture the same as commerce? Of course there are financial exchanges involved in any cultural process, people are working, have to live, to pay their bills, even artists have to live one way or another – they can’t live of pure idealism.

But culture is, in terms of content and meaning, not a commodity at all. Even when surrounded by worldly concerns, culture – true culture, not [redacted] and [redacted] and especially, [redacted] – is symbolic, part of the values of a civilization, a mental field of experimentation and exploration, and of creation and definition of value and meaning which go beyond the purely physical pressures of life. This means that cultural products can never be dominated by the question of demand, but are there to be shared with the public as something that conveys knowledge, meaning, understanding, questioning, exploration, for its own sake and as such related to the human condition. This means that the public has (where necessary) to be educated to be able to experience cultural products, and that is the opposite of treating it as a commodity. Where a civilization treats its most important symbols of identity and values as commodities in a market place, it destroys the heart of their meaning.

It will be clear that today, the cultural products which convey meaning, identity, exploration of the human condition etc. etc. are mainly to be found in the culture of the past. The majority of contemporary cultural production as presented in public space by the cultural establishments, are indeed nothing more than commodities the meaning of which can only be found in the price people want to pay for it – searching for meaning is no longer fashionable. So, the initiative of governments to treat culture as commodity is related to contemporary production since that attitude itself is a product of contemproary fashion. It is thus nothing less than a scandal that also OLD cultural products are treated as if they were nothing more than the majority of contemporary production as considered ‘relevant’ in public space.

It is not only in France that this happens…. in Germany, the country which considered itself a Kulturnation, such ideas are already circulating longer:

http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.nl/2017/05/high-culture-as-commodity.html

There are people in positions of power who want to sell-out the achievements of past generations, which have become part of cultural identity of countries, to the demands of the public. Which means, if at some stage many people prefer to have opera houses and orchestras fold and be replaced by rap gangs, governments will duly fulfil the wishes of the ignorant and primitive masses. This attitude in combination with the upsurge of populism offers a perspective in which Europe wilfully destroys itself and the best which it had tried to create.

The news of a rapper in Germany who got the Goethe Plaque is, in this perspective, a troubling signal.

https://slippedisc.com/2017/11/german-cool-rapper-receives-the-goethe-prize/

Politicians are, through education and through the filter of interests, a product of their own time, a time without cultural awareness.