Tribune. While the health crisis has pushed political decision-makers to classify places of art and culture as non-essential, how can we restore all of its legitimacy and necessity to current artistic creation? How to forge new forms of links between artists and audiences who are first and foremost, all of them, citizens?
Art is not just a question of cultural supply and consumption, with artists on one side and potential receivers on the other. On the contrary, initiating a work of art can be the business of all those who wish it. Taking responsibility for doing common work is what has been enabling and encouraging, for nearly thirty years, the action New Sponsors.
Redistributed roles
If this has been the subject of some forums lately and, previously, of several reference books, the many artists – more than three hundred to date, including us – who have contributed to this action have that rarely spoke. No doubt now is the time to do it, when this device could bring, in its own way and in its measure, a new breath to a suffering society.
The New Sponsors action brings together three actors through a protocol: citizen sponsors, a mediator and an artist. Worn to this day by the Foundation of France, this program offers the framework and the means for risk-taking and common responsibility: to produce a work in response to an order or, one could say, to a shared “concern”.
Until now, the artistic commission has often aimed, thanks to the work thus produced, to offer the commissioner symbolic, even political, recognition through the eyes of the public. Or, more insidiously, to decide for the latter what he would be bound to appreciate. With this action, it is not the case: the roles are redistributed. Anyone can sponsor as long as a “need” for art is expressed. Even more upstream, it can even be a complex problem that arises, art can respond to it by giving it a form.
It is moreover very often in this place, where there are knots, that mediators intervene in order to convert the problems into problems to be implemented. They are also those in a situation of mediation alongside the sponsoring citizens who, after helping them to formulate their request in a set of specifications, propose one or more artists able to respond. The artists are thus chosen by the sponsors, after discussions with the mediator.
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