lThe anniversary of the birth of Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) will serve to remember what the composer and conductor contributed to music. Let’s say here what he contributed to culture: an authority of the artist in front of the State that subsidizes him. It scared the politician. Today politicians scare artists. The relationship has been so reversed that they have reason to worry.
Only Boulez went into exile in Germany in 1958, believing that, in musical France, “Imbecility is more widespread there than anywhere else”. That, in 1966, he published a devastating text in The new observertitled “Why I say no to Malraux”, in which he vomits the musical life outlined by Charles de Gaulle’s emblematic minister. Before President Georges Pompidou gave him the keys to music in France in the early 1970s.
Boulez’s influence was all the more fascinating given that contemporary music is a niche art, considered elitist and dependent on public money. His international stature played in his favor, but let us add that he was far from the only one who stood up to political power. At that time, beyond distrust, contempt, hostility and some censorship, there existed above all a kind of modus vivendi, an “everyone at home”, between the politician and the artist. The very conservative Maurice Druon, Minister of Culture in the 1970s, mocked the acrobats who came to ask for the subsidy. “with a bowl in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other”but he lasted less than a year in office.
And then the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, in the early 1980s, thanks to his stature and his achievements spread over ten years, imposed the artist as king in society. He established jurisprudence for three decades. For a political leader, to criticize the subsidized artist was to devalue oneself, to demonetize oneself. Gives the impression of being a nerd or a censor. A mayor from the left or the right could find a piece or an exhibition inept, but would say nothing about it.
Culture under attack
Today Lang is no longer the boss and things are up in the air. No more complexes. Mayors and other elected officials no longer hesitate to say what they think about this or that demonstration, or even to impose their tastes. The elitism of a work and the leftism of its author are often accused. Every time they hide behind popular taste, which has good support.
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