3 November 2026
Elena Polivtseva
While I was working on the second edition of State of Culture, published by Culture Action Europe in October 2026, someone from outside the cultural sector asked me: ‘Why put so much effort into making a case for culture? People will always need it. It will always exist.’
The report isn't about making a case for culture. But the argument stayed with me. We all live through culture, and it has been there at all times, sometimes like an invisible infrastructure. Yet rarely do people pause to consider how culture comes into being.
Culture is undoubtedly a huge part of people's lives, and many recognise it: almost 80% of Europeans say culture is important to them personally. Yet today, the cultural sector is being defunded, attacked and questioned in many parts of Europe. Too many people working in culture struggle to make ends meet. Something, then, is fundamentally amiss in how we collectively relate to culture: how we support it, how we argue for it, how we govern it, or how we make it.
Our state of culture today is, frankly, one of deadlock. But it is also a moment to question some fundamental assumptions about how culture comes into being in today’s world, and to ask what we have got wrong.
Intrinsic value doesn't sell. Instrumentalisation doesn't deliver. What's the third way?
There seems to be no return to art for art’s sake. As a political argument, it has been exhausted almost to the bone. Neither the right nor the left seems willing to embrace art ‘just because’, both eager to distance themselves from anything that might appear elitist or out of touch with ordinary people. Moreover, no matter the political colour, the realities of a permanent crisis demand utility and problem-solving from everything that dares to claim taxpayers’ money.
Cultural policy has therefore gradually put culture — the very object of its legitimacy — at the service of other policy agendas. Mountains of evidence of culture’s impact have accumulated, and artists have learned to describe their work in the language of social workers, doctors, urban planners, city tour operators, diplomats and economists.
But by now, only a denier could claim that instrumentalisation has not come at a cost. Project-based, theme-driven and prescriptive funding may keep the sector busy and afloat, but it does little to sustain what we expect culture to be: a formidable space for transformative imagination. And despite its eagerness to embrace the latest policy priorities, culture remains among the first to lose public money when austerity strikes.
And yet, the belief that culture is ‘that which makes life worth living’, as T. S. Eliot put it in 1948, has not disappeared. Many actors in public policy and philanthropy continue to see culture as a powerful ally in confronting the defining challenges of our time. In different pockets of decision-making, culture is still valued, celebrated — and expected to perform miracles.
What, then, is the third way, if the paradigm of intrinsic value has lost its political force, while instrumentalism is failing culture itself?
State of Culture 2026
When asked ‘Why is culture important?’, what comes to mind? Perhaps mind-blowing inventions, sharp and unsettling stories, dystopias and utopias. Beauty that hurts the eyes, melodies that stop us in our tracks, experiences that change our lives forever. Things we could never have imagined existing, yet can never erase from our minds once we've encountered them. Bold, free-spirited people and collectives. Or powerful artworks that have moved societies and changed history.
Art surely still does all this. But I dare to suggest that the conditions for such artistic power increasingly exist at the fringes of the system, rather than at its heart. Artistic power requires freedom and courage, but also time, room for trial and error, and the capacity to withstand reputational risks, disappointment and downtime.
Yet today's cultural sector tells us that freedom is hardly its strongest resource. Only 15% of State of Culture survey respondents testify that existing funding schemes give them enough creative freedom; 26% of respondents report having experienced censorship, and almost half (47%) say they censored themselves in the recent past. Only 60% agree that they can express their artistic views freely and safely in their country. That leaves four in ten unable or hesitating to affirm something that should be a basic condition of artistic work.
Cases of censorship and interference have surged to levels that some consider unprecedented in Europe. Respondents also identify funding cuts and economic insecurity as major constraints on artistic freedom. Economic decline has climbed up the list of challenges facing the sector: in 2024, it ranked last among seven challenges in the State of Culture survey; in 2026, it ranked second, surpassed only by social polarisation. This is not merely a matter of sectoral perception. Public funding for culture has been under pressure for years (UNESCO 2026), and the past two years have brought particularly severe cuts in several parts of Europe (PAC 2026).
Defunding is nothing new. What distinguishes the past couple of years, however, is that cuts are increasingly justified not only through the familiar language of austerity, but also through explicitly political or ideological arguments. Defunding often affects non-profit and smaller organisations first, especially those working with communities, marginalised groups and challenging social contexts.
When public funding becomes scarce and independent cultural infrastructures weaken, commercial and ideological actors gain more room to acquire and shape the spaces through which culture reaches the public. The Bolloré case in France illustrates how concentrated media ownership can exercise political influence over cultural narratives. Meanwhile, the acquisition of music festivals by large corporate groups, including American companies, has exposed growing tensions between commercial interests, political affiliations and artists’ values.
The relationship between art and society has also emerged as a source of constraint on artistic expression. Audience disapproval is a phenomenon as old as art itself. But after decades of aspiring to become more socially engaged, inclusive and politically aware, the cultural sector has taken on an increasingly complex social role. Artists and cultural institutions have been encouraged to engage wider and more diverse publics, and in many cases have succeeded. Yet this expanded role has not always been accompanied by the resources, tools and capacities needed to navigate its complexity.
So, today, art increasingly finds itself at the heart of society's conflicts, sensitivities and polarised expectations. Artists and cultural institutions are expected to bring different perspectives into the same space, but often without sufficient resources, time, mediation, trust, protection or shared methods for working through disagreement.
The State of Culture report observes that freedom of artistic expression in Europe is now under more pressure than a few years ago, and that this pressure has ‘many faces’: state scrutiny, funding decisions, budget cuts, market concentration, social backlash and internalised caution within institutions.
This resonates with Nina Weijers’ diagnosis of the freedom of art in the USA: ‘Great literature thrives on freedom and experiment, but with culture on the left and Trumpian hostility on the right, fear is what chiefly dominates among contemporary American writers. What use are they to us now?’
This brings me to one of the memorable ideas from the interviews for State of Culture 2026. Nina George, writer and the President of Honour of the European Writers’ Council, distinguished between subsidised culture, market culture and a third space, which she called ‘wild punk’. Market culture bends towards target groups, visibility, marketing logic and happy endings. Subsidised culture must navigate the state's priorities, funding criteria and definitions of value. But where is the space for art that answers to neither? For work that does not have to be immediately understandable, marketable, useful, measurable or even acceptable?
As Nina asked: ‘Where's the wild punk, and how could we manage to have infrastructures so that the wild punk can flourish?’
Cultural industrial revolution
But we have learned by now that defending art as a space for freedom and risk is hardly enough to secure its place in public budgets or major policy agendas. Art must be free, yes, but apparently not just for the sake of its own freedom. It must be free to do something else: heal, restore democracy, generate income, bring people together, save the planet, boost tourism. Or preferably all of this at once.
As I write in State of Culture 2026, the past decades have produced an impressive collection of arguments for culture's value: from human rights to creative industries, from social cohesion to democratic resilience. Yet these narratives have not replaced one another. They have accumulated, layer upon layer, forming an ever-growing snowball of justifications. One could ask: so what? Culture can indeed do many things. But while busy solving problems, does it still have the freedom to move minds and change history?
Here, it may be worth returning to a classic of sociology: On Justification: Economies of Worth (1991) by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. Their central argument is that societies operate through different orders of worth: distinct systems through which we establish what is valuable, legitimate and worthy of recognition. They identify six different ‘orders of worth’: market, industrial, civic, domestic, inspired, and the world of fame.
These are not simply different narratives about value. Each world has its own logic, standards of judgment and, crucially, tests of worth: ways of establishing and proving what deserves recognition. They coexist, sometimes reaching compromises, sometimes colliding. Of particular interest here is the tension between the inspired and industrial worlds.
In the inspired world, worth emerges through something that cannot be fully controlled or anticipated: inspiration, passion, uncertainty, a leap into the unknown. What matters is not necessarily useful, efficient, logical or measurable. As Boltanski and Thévenot explain, awakening one's creative faculties may require us to ‘not always think about being useful, efficient, logical, rational’.
The industrial world operates almost in reverse. Value is demonstrated through functionality, productivity, reliability and the capacity to plan and predict outcomes. What cannot be measured or made operational appears inefficient, subjective and basically unworthy. ‘The quality of worthy beings, beings that are functional, operational, or […] professional, thus express their capacity to integrate themselves into the machinery, the cogwheels of an organisation, along with their predictability, their reliability, and it guarantees realistic projects into the future’, Boltanski and Thévenot explain.
Over the past decades, successive crises and changing political priorities have brought new justifications for culture to the forefront: economic growth, shared identity, social inclusion, democratic resilience, international visibility and, more recently, preparedness and security. These ambitions draw, in different combinations, on market, domestic, civic, fame and industrial logics. Rather than choosing between them, cultural policy has largely embraced them all. Cultural organisations are now expected to be autonomous and accountable, innovative and rooted, economically productive and socially reparative, nationally meaningful and internationally attractive.
There is nothing inherently wrong with recognising culture's multiple contributions. But different orders of worth do not coexist without friction. Social inclusion may conflict with market growth; artistic experimentation rarely follows the rules of efficiency; international visibility does not always strengthen local relationships. The vital question, therefore, is which values prevail when they collide, and who gets to decide.
This is where the distinction between the language of cultural policy and the mechanisms of cultural governance becomes critical. The rhetoric of recently adopted cultural strategies all across Europe accommodate an ever-expanding universe of values — artistic freedom, culture as a public good, a pillar of democracy, a force for imagination. But funding systems determine which of these values can actually be made sense of in practice. And despite the plurality of ambitions, the conditions of public support are still – or increasingly – governed by one dominant logic: the industrial order of worth.
Projects, measurable outputs, strategic alignment, performance indicators, reporting obligations and short-term results have become the principal language through which public support is distributed and justified. One of the strongest critiques emerging in the State of Culture survey concerns the dominance of short-term, project-centred funding, identified by respondents as the most pressing problem in public cultural funding, with 54% respondents to our survey selecting it from a list of ten funding-related issues. The dominance of project funding is described as misaligned with how cultural work actually happens: not only through defined outputs, but also through relationship-building, open-ended exploration, research, risk-taking, experimentation and continuous practice.
Cultural policies celebrate artistic experimentation, imagination, and social engagement while asking the sector to predict outcomes, quantify audiences and demonstrate impact often before the work has started. Because in the industrial order of worth, the unknown is a hurdle to manage, not an opportunity for exploration.
The dominance of the project model is not accidental. When resources shrink and demand grows, project funding offers a rational way to distribute scarce money. It allows governments and foundations to focus on specific priorities, allocate resources competitively, rotate beneficiaries, monitor results and demonstrate accountability. It also reflects the broader triumph of new public management, which has made efficiency, evidence and measurable performance the badges of institutional credibility. In politically divided environments, managerial language can offer the additional comfort of apparent neutrality.
The industrial order of worth is not inherently hostile to culture. Professional expertise, effective administration and long-term planning are indispensable to artistic creation. The problem starts when these mechanisms move from being the conditions supporting artistic work to determining what artistic work is all about. When efficiency, measurability and predictability become the dominant tests of cultural value, other ways of recognising worth are pushed aside.
Culture does not transform society because it has been commissioned to deliver transformation. Its most profound effects are usually unforeseen, emerging through encounters, interpretations and developments that no funding application could have anticipated. The problem with cultural governance, then, lies not only in the ever-growing expectations placed on culture to save the world, but also in the ways culture is allowed to try to do so.
Bring the ‘wild punk’ back
Let’s go back to Nina’s question: ‘Where's the wild punk, and how could we manage to have infrastructures so that the wild punk can flourish?’
Even the wildest punk needs infrastructure. It needs time, space, resources and the freedom to fail. These infrastructures are functioning social security, basic-income schemes, artist-run spaces, independent production infrastructures, residencies without output pressure, low-threshold grants, protection for non-institutional practice, and public spaces where experimentation does not have to justify itself through audience growth or immediate compliance with subsidy priorities.
These infrastructures are crucial also because artistic risk is not equally affordable. Without material security, artistic courage becomes a privilege of those who can absorb its consequences. Or, as Nina put it: ‘In the end, only white guys can afford to make punk.’
To revive artistic courage, we also need to rethink accountability. Funding reporting cannot be reduced to verifying whether predefined outcomes have been delivered. It should also — or instead — ask whether support has strengthened artistic autonomy, sustained capacities, opened opportunities for experimentation and allowed something unexpected to emerge.
For policymakers and foundations, this means shifting from continually commissioning culture to deliver specific benefits towards sustaining the people, spaces, relationships and freedoms from which cultural value emerges, including forms of value nobody has yet imagined. Funders cannot commission the ‘wild punk’, prescribe imagination or manufacture artistic power, but they can build the conditions in which all this can flourish.
This is not a return to art for art's sake, nor a rejection of culture's wider societal responsibilities. It is a different understanding of how culture becomes capable of fulfilling them, while also becoming a strong, autonomous and diverse sector capable of withstanding political and economic pressures which, sadly, are likely to continue to arise.
Artistic freedom cannot be understood merely as the absence of interference, or as a matter of individual courage. The ability to be rebellious, experimental or uncompromising depends on the sustainability of conditions one works in and on the robustness of the wider professional collective. Freedom without the means to exercise it is not more than another privilege reserved just for a few.
But can we expect cultural policy itself to become a little more ‘punk’ too? To be bolder, to truly champion culture — not as a secondary aspect of life, something we turn to only once everything else is in order, but as a public good that urgently needs protection and care.
Cultural policy must move beyond being a machinery of projects and visibility. It must engage with the wider conditions that make society’s freedom and imagination possible: social security, income protection, taxation, housing, human rights, digitalisation and AI. These may fall outside the traditional remit of cultural policy, but they determine the conditions in which today’s culture is made.
And what if, instead of endlessly measuring culture's impact on other policy objectives, governments took equally seriously the impact of other policies on culture? What if cultural policy became a force capable of challenging decisions made elsewhere in government, instead of simply adapting to their consequences?
Cultural ministries need to become more than distributors of subsidies. Above all, cultural policy must become a true custodian of artistic freedom: not just defending it in declarations, but standing up for artistic freedom every time it is attacked, actively protecting artists and cultural organisations from attacks, challenging the conditions that constrain their independence, and reminding society and policymakers what artistic freedom means, and what is lost when it is dismantled.
No, my fellow citizen. Culture may always exist, but the conditions that make it possible won't sustain themselves. And if 80% of Europeans say culture matters to them, it's time we all, in different ways, found the courage to stand up for it.
You can download the State of Culture 2026 report from the website of Culture Action Europe.
