Tribune. Like a bad novel that falls out of our hands, like a series that is abandoned by dint of banalities, repetitions and inconsistencies, the government’s policy in matters of art and culture seems governed by a single principle: to arouse high hopes to disappoint them almost immediately.
In 2020, the report signed by Bruno Racine [ancien président de la Bibliothèque nationale] lucidly underlined the precariousness and degradation of the remunerations of artist-authors. An audit without appeal and hardly shining for a ministry of culture which has, for decades, quite simply “forgotten” the 270,000 individuals yet at the origin of the works which make its vitality and its heritage. The creators themselves, very much alive and in professional activity.
This report proposed clear solutions to remedy an unworthy social situation: identification of the profession, effective access to social rights, creation of a binding collective bargaining body for the operators of works, professional elections, promotion of creative work, minimum salary targets, etc. Above all, he envisioned artist-authors as a category in their own right, professionals with common interests, whose status required an overhaul to finally get out of the blind spot of cultural policies.
A little more than a year later, the announcements of the Ministry of Culture sound the death knell for the hopes that the Racine report gave birth to. Nothing changes. Despite a final diagnosis, the ministry blindly pursues a cultural policy that continues to deny that we are working. That we too are culture professionals.
Measurements
The tinkering continues, the same tinkering which means that for forty years, our dedicated social security organization has failed in the mission delegated to it by the State. The new branch of Urssaf, created for artist-authors, is still not operational more than fifteen months after its launch? “The government will take care of it”, we are told once again. Are comic book artists making noise in the media? So they may be paid, on a trial basis, for the dedications they perform at certain festivals. The sector funds will be renewed? When we see the difficulty of accessing it and the multiple criteria, disconnected from professional reality, which constitute a barrier, shouldn’t we have corrected things?
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