ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits the 1972 UNESCO publication Cultural Development: Experience and Policies. Its lead author Augustin Girard—the French Ministry of Culture’s forward-looking research director—drew two key distinctions: “Culture with a Capital C” vs “culture as it really is”, and cultural democratization vs cultural democracy. Arts organizations producing varieties of Capital-C Culture were well supported by government funding agencies in the affluent West, then as now, even though the majority of taxpayers whose money made that support possible had nothing to do with them. Girard considered this neither fair nor democratically defensible. Policies of cultural democratization intended to develop broad popular audiences for subsidized art in the Capital-C Culture category seemed not to be working. Girard pushed for cultural democracy instead: for new types of policy promoting local-level debate about the arts and wider culture; leading if necessary to fairly radical reform of funding models inherited from the past.
Funding the Arts starts with Girard, to show how little has changed in the half-century since his manifesto appeared; to explain why cultural democratization efforts were doomed to fail (however well intended); and to prepare readers for the unavoidably politicized nature of arguments unfolding later in the book.
