We hear a lot of talk lately about the “world of culture”. There would be a cohesive assembly of talented personalities upholding higher principles under tangible spiritual authority. It looks very much like the Catholic Church, but with more women under the robes and fewer biblical references. Instead of publishing encyclicals, organizing processions and condemning heretical theses, this assembly expresses itself through petition, happening and public denunciation. It similarly claims to defend the oppressed, prepare the Kingdom and exorcise the crowds from the influence of Satan. Not many people take them seriously in the French population, in view of opinion surveys, but the members of this assembly, although constantly losing credit, take themselves a little more seriously every day and even imagine themselves combining the strengths of Jean Moulin, Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre. As they are often average actors, disconnected heirs or winded writers, we would tend to blame their fragile sensitivity, their confused imagination and their limited intellectual means for this propensity for narcissistic delirium which further disturbs their unregulated relationship. to reality.
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In truth, we find very few authentic artists among these functionaries – or mercenaries – of cultural power who play cardinals in tuxedos or saints in Dior necklines. The world of cinema has generally lost major arts, mass literature too, all these people are floundering in theentertainment vulgar or miserable by imagining that attaching an LFI pin to Mickey’s frock coat will give them the extra soul necessary to claim to be Émile Zola. This is all parody, and all parody ends in inversion. We defend the most useful oppressed to maintain our privileges; we are preparing a utopia where we keep our VIP square; we demonize the proletarian party, whose accession to power we fear all the more because it would risk reducing the windfall of subsidies and we claim, by putting on a panicked air, by miming demonic trances, that not subsidizing the next queer turnip would amount to assassinating Mozart; that closing the squat where ten retarded teenagers struggle to disguise themselves as Che Guevara would be equivalent to razing the Parthenon; that limiting the publication of navel-plaintive testimonies written in French SMS but inclusive is comparable to the act of burning Research. Behind all these counterfeits of an insurrection of the spirit, it is a question of barricading one’s worldly advantages.
Today, what represents a real danger for freedom and for art is not the threats of the day before yesterday, but this great post-cultural, crypto-propagandist and neo-clerical counterfeit which has established its undivided reign for around thirty years, because it is an obstacle, its very functioning, to authentic creation and divergent perspectives. Distributing subsidies on moral rather than aesthetic criteria, it maintains a low-end culture of humanitarian catechesis which crushes, through its disproportionate material levers, any singular proposal. When an original artist nevertheless manages to impose a discordant voice (often a writer, less dependent on economic funds than a filmmaker, a playwright or a choreographer), this church emits fatwas in the form of a petition or media smear campaign (Tesson, Millet, Camus, Dantec, the film North Bac paid the price). Over time, its nepotistic influence grows and imposes an ever more implacable ideological conformism on those who claim to join it or not be excommunicated.
If we hope to be able to restore French culture to the vitality, depth and power it deserves, what better can we wish for than this little sect exploding?
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