Does the left own culture?

The left considers the world of culture to be its preserve, and fears a “cultural counter-revolution” if the RN assumes responsibility on Sunday

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Whatever the outcome of the legislative elections on July 7, the issues and problems addressed during the campaign will have been important. Even if, for most media, the main thing – at least before the first round – was to demonstrate the harmfulness of the National Rally (RN). Also, when an analysis provokes reflection and stimulates controversy, it is not useless to attach value to it.

Heritage versus creation

This is what I want to do with the first part of “With the RN, towards a cultural counter-revolution” published in The world by Roxana Azimi and Michel Guerrin. His columns on culture have always interested me for their freedom and relative neutrality in a daily life hostile to the right and up in arms against the extreme right. The first impression that emerges is the desire to make any dissent, difference, nuance in relation to the dominant cultural conception – very largely inspired by the left, creators and artists being mostly imbued with this vision – appear as a counter-revolution. One could only perceive them as the diversification and enrichment of an estimable palette, often acceptable but to be invigorated, to be renewed.

Also read, Didier Desrimais: A brief overview of the concerns of the “world of culture”

So the RN, if it were in power, “would cause a rupture by favoring heritage to the detriment of creation”. It seems to me that it would not be an absurdity to first maintain or restore what already exists. Creation, if it were less privileged, would probably have to be more demanding in the riches it offers. Not just anyone could call themselves an artist and therefore immediately benefit from subsidies that it would not be shameful to refuse to lucubrations or vague concepts. Considering that the honor of being called an artist could only result from certain promises or experiences appreciated over time would not be an offense to culture. But on the contrary, discrimination no longer makes a certain culture ridiculous through systematic validation of everything that claims to be worthy of interest. It would in no case be a question of prohibiting incongruities or provocations, but of depriving them of an official label which aims to legitimize them when their reality is more than mediocre…

Also read, Henri Beaumont: The wasteland is changing

We then perceive the ambiguity of the lawsuit which is brought against a conservative conception of art. As if this vision were dangerous in principle when today it would only represent a beneficial complementarity to the domination of an artistic progressivism which no longer has, in its design, the will to serve the universal, to to be shared by a multitude but on the contrary to dispense with multiple approval to get stuck in the bizarre, the hermetic, the obscure or, sometimes worse, the sordid. The right is also criticized for a populism which would lead it to despise authentic culture because it would be the prerogative of the left, of globalized elites, privileged and disconnected from reality. This criticism is a caricature that could easily be reversed: it is the elites who overall, more or less, have shaped, developed, a culture for themselves, which resembles them, with the main characteristic being the desire to distance the people from it. . With his vulgar taste and his elementary curiosity, he is obviously incapable of going towards the cultural treasures which, in all the arts, require refined dilections…

Don’t touch my culture!

Throughout the analysis that I am evoking, there runs, in fact, implicitly, this condescending refrain that the left is the owner of culture, that the simple fact, for the extreme right, of coming to interfere in it would be a usurpation and that these are activities too noble and elevated to be entrusted to these “rednecks”. To follow this slope to the letter, we have the right, even the duty, to wonder if the right and, perhaps, its extreme right should not seek to create an art for the people, a culture accessible to all , in the genre that Jean Vilar was fond of – a popular elitism -, obviously the antipodes of any indoctrination whatsoever. Isn’t this what Ariane Mnouchkine, a reference for all culture enthusiasts and whose thinking is “à la carte” suggests:
“I think we are partly responsible, we, the people of the left, we, the people of culture. We let the people down, we didn’t want to listen to their fears, their anxieties. When people said what they saw, we told them they were wrong, that they didn’t see what they saw. It was just a misleading feeling, they were told. Then, as they insisted, we told them they were idiots, then, as they insisted even more, we called them bastards.” (Release).
What it applies to culture, to denounce ostracism, is also the fundamental force which, made of condescension and contempt, has created today’s politics. The left calls itself the owner of culture. You have to challenge him.