The French government had the idea to give teenagers a 300 Euro credit (through a phone app) to spend on “culture”. A few limits were placed upon it – a 100 Euro maximum on online subscriptions, and any video games had to be French (trade protectionism is a given in any French cultural policy) – but otherwise the youths had a pretty free hand. And with those free hands they spend roughly half their totals on Manga. The New York Times reports:
As of this month, books represented over 75 percent of all purchases made through the app since it was introduced nationwide in May — and roughly two-thirds of those books were manga, according to the organization that runs the app, called the Culture Pass.
The French news media has written of a “manga rush,” fueled by a “manga pass” — observations that came via a slightly distorted lens, since the app arrived just as theaters, cinemas and music festivals, emerging from pandemic-related restrictions, had less to offer. And manga were already wildly popular in France.
But the focus on comic books reveals a subtle tension at the heart of the Culture Pass’s design, between the almost total freedom it affords it young users — including to buy the mass media they already love — and its architects’ aim of guiding users toward lesser-known and more highbrow arts.
So lets dig deeper into that “subtle tension”…
I’m going to start with John Rawls A Theory of Justice (don’t worry, this will only take a minute). In Rawls’s liberal egalitarian ideal, equality in individuals’ “primary goods” is paramount: those goods like wealth, freedoms, political participation, that allow us to get on in the world. But he strongly rejected what he called “perfectionism”, the idea that the state ought to encourage some ways of getting on over others. It is up to each of us individually to determine for ourselves what would constitute a life well lived. A consequence of this (on which he is quite clear), is that, beyond what would be covered as a part of basic schooling for young people, there is no justification for state subsidy of the arts. It is important for people to have as equal resources as we can manage, but it’s not up to the state to direct people one way or another in terms of how they use those resources.
Well, so what? But even if you want nothing to do with his moral philosophy, he raises something very important for arts policy: if we are going to depart from a world of pure consumer sovereignty when it comes to the arts, then the state is making a statement: the arts matter in a way that justifies the state trying to steer people towards it. We are not as squeamish about perfectionism as he is.
Now there are many, many reasons that have been put forward about why the arts deserve public sector support: economists with their externalities, and all manner of what came to be known (maybe unfortunately) as instrumental and intrinsic benefits. But, whatever argument might be your favorite, it will provoke the question, “what sort of arts best serve the goals I have outlined?” Is life more fulfilling with an engagement with what in days of yore were referred to as the high arts? Are externalities greater for classical than for pop music?
Or is it all the same, and the only thing that matters is what people like: prejudice apart, pushpin is as good as poetry; Manga is as good as Flaubert. If pleasure is the only thing that matters, then we have to ask: why restrict a transfer of funds to teenagers to culture in the first place? What if they would rather have 300 Euros for railway tickets, or some new clothes, or for some proper kitchen utensils for their first apartment? If the concern is that only teenagers from wealthier and/or more formally educated families will take part in culture, what of it, if other teenagers would really rather have funds to spend on something else?
And this is the narrow path arts policy must tread: on the one side it wants to say the arts matter in a very specific way to people’s wellbeing. But it also as far as possible wants to avoid being too prescriptive. (I’ve always thought that part of the evil genius that is the arts “economic impact” claim is that it says the arts matter while avoiding any judgment over the art itself – all that matters is that money was spent, and a dollar is a dollar is a dollar).
We see this tension in the Times’ story:
Jean-Michel Tobelem, an associate professor at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne who specializes in the economics of culture, said that it was a laudable effort but that it would largely benefit the mainstream media.
“You don’t need to push young people to go see the latest Marvel movie,” he said. There is nothing wrong with pop music or blockbusters, he stressed, acknowledging that “you can enter Korean culture through K-Pop and then discover that there is a whole cinema, a literature, painters and composers that go with it.”
But Tobelem said that he was unconvinced that the no-strings-attached approach of the Culture Pass would do that, and that the app gave few incentives to engage with “works that are more demanding on an artistic level.”
We can certainly make the judgment that Manga is just fine, and if young people prefer it to other literature, well, that’s what being young is (my own seventeen-year old tastes were not any more sophisticated). But it leaves the question: why subsidize Manga? What is meant to be accomplished here?
Framing the policy choice as requiring preferring one art over another is a fallacy. In a democratic society, there is a compelling state interest in a citizenry that is educated about the values and ideas held by others different from themselves. (The “public forum” legal doctrine translates that concept into jurisprudence.) Cultural policy should be made with that goal in mind, not picking one class or ethnicity’s art as superior but encouraging citizens to encounter others’ viewpoints — with the arts as expressing structures of feeling along with ideas. Algorhythms like facebooks could easily be designed to identify and push a menu of individualized recommendations (which could be discounted based on how big a stretch from my present taste profile it would be).
I agree with Larry – we subsidize school because it’s important that people be educated. We subsidize science because we need innovation. In neither case do we know exactly what the longterm specific benefits are – only that there are likely to be benefits. am not a reader of mangas, so I can’t pass judgment on them, but I was, in my youth, a heavy consumer of comic books, which got me hooked on reading. As an experiment I find this intriguing. I also think that it isn’t necessarily all just about the end-consumer, the students. It’s also about encouraging and injecting capital into a market and being able to pay the artists who produce it. Given how many of the models that previously supported culture of all kinds have been broken, this seems like a good chance to learn something.
Larry and Doug, thank you for your comments.
My central point is this: subsidizing the arts, whether through grants to presenters and individual artists, or vouchers for consumers (in this particular case, young consumers) requires some sort of public interest rationale. Pick your favourite. But it will then imply that some things are more worthy of subsidy than others, things that better serve that public interest. Our late friend and great arts policy scholar Mark Schuster once said that any coherent arts policy should be able to answer the question “to what requests do we say ‘no’?” – arts policy creates choices that need be made.
Larry has this goal: an arts policy that encourages us to see other viewpoints (for a time, I believe this was the strategy of Arts Council England, in a heavy promotion of multiculturalism). But *if* that’s the goal it would require some “curation”, especially so if we are thinking about teenagers – I think this was one of the points made by an interviewee in the Times story.
Doug mentions education and basic scientific research, but they are *heavily* curated – school materials are chosen with a particular balance of goals in mind, such that even at the university level we continue to enforce very specific general education requirements. Scientific research is funded only through a rigorous peer review process, and even unfunded research is evaluated on how well it serves the goal of the advancement of scholarship.
My post is not about Manga, it’s about how to reconcile underlying arts policy goals with giving teenagers a load of Euros to spend on anything so long as (with a few exceptions) it sits in this very wide circle they define as “culture”, even if it constitutes the emptiest of calories.
We agree that uncurated just-give-them-$ approach is an ineffective way to achieve the public goal of making teens or anyone else more cultured (whether that means more high-cultured — a bad goal — or more aware of and appreciative of experiences and ways of seeing the world other than their own). But your last sentence begs the question of what is good for us. I think it is good for people who have never eaten at Cracker Barrel or McDonald’s to dine there; I think it is good for people who have never had a tamale to go to a Mexican place to try one. The curation with regard to culture should be individualized to broaden and diversify everyone’s cultural consumption. That makes for a healthier body politic.
So what’s wrong with curating? I’m sure within the manga community there is fierce curation as to what’s better and what’s not. Isn’t curation an essential part of building a culture around something? Why can’t you declare something a benefit to society generally and allow a flourishing culture of specific curation within it? A culture pass essentially removes financial barriers, leveling the field and letting people vote on what to spend on which culture is important to them. And it’s a way of injecting cash into cultural production. Given all the other areas of the economy that we subsidize directly and indirectly, this seems like a good small step.
You need some reason to inject cash into cultural production. Film production tax credits in US states inject cash into production, but on all manner of junk, so long as it meets employment quotas, and no one is going to convince me that is a sound use of public money. Arts policy means choices: what is the reason for using money *this* way and not *that* way. And a policy that says to teens “here’s some money – a lot of money – to buy comics” needs a better public-benefit rationale than I’ve yet to see here
Maybe you are missing the point of the government lucre and the Culture Pass app—and any resulting consumption trends. From a cultural engineering standpoint, this platform/programme is now building digital infrastructure that in future could allow french government policy-makers to change the terms and conditions in very deliberate ways. They might adapt the Culture Pass mechanism and funding so it no longer supports Manga and incentivises young adults to experience other art forms or old guard ticketed experiences (such as opera). Think of any digital tool you now use (Facebook, Flickr, Spotify, Canva) and how over time it got you hooked, but then changed something from within. Those changes to digital ecosystem also forced you to adapt with it. And you have. But as a cultural engineer, I’d leave it alone for awhile and let it ride the Manga wave. Why, because the app-based digital underpinnings also mean that user habits and interests are feeding some kind of big data machinery. And this will be quantitatively useful beyond the opening stages of the initiative (but not obvious in the early consumption phase). With a few years worth of Culture Pass data, the revelation of trends (such as the above Manga-mania) might actually inform the old guard art forms (for example opera). What if we took all the 2021/22 Manga-related Culture Pass data and trends, asked the users more about this cultural experience, plumbed the phenomena a bit more deeply, and that led to the development of (again just for example) a new 21st century Manga opera to premiere at the Bastille in 2025? I’m just thinking and typing, but I don’t reckon that this early phase is all about the Manga-mania. I am pretty sure (if the old guard are smart), they will harness what’s happening with 18 year olds—and grab the tools that the gods of Culture Pass have bestowed upon mere mankind—and make new art for a hungry post-Covid audience.
Reading skills, drawing, the creation of plot lines, the creation of characters, the art of timing and dramatic arches, character development, the correlation of visual imagery with dialog and description, art and social commentary. There is much that young people can learn from manga, comic books, and graphic novels.
When considering public funding and it’s public interest rationale, an important factor is reaching toward people in the place where they stand. For our youth, manga ain’t such a bad place to start. Could be worse. Sure, we would like them to go see a production Woyzeck, but let’s be realistic.
Part of the public interest rationale also evaluates the long-term ripple effects of the funding. Consider, for example, that storyboarding has become an important part of film-making. In Hollywood, I suspect that one can hardly get a film funded without a storyboard presentation. In many respects, comic books are readymade film storyboards. Perhaps this accounts for the preponderance of superhero movies of late, most of which I find awful, but it illustrates the correlations between comic books, storyboards, films, and the cultural world we live in.
I think it is difficult to predict how these correlations might affect a young person’s mind. The skills apparent in the creation of manga might produce the next George Lucas, but through the complex avenues of the human mind, it might also produce the next Alfred Hitchcock whose stories often have a kind of manga-like iconic vividness. Public funding has to be based on a basic respect for the people it serves, a careful balance between approachability and elevation.
All of the commentary around this misses that bandes dessinees (comics) are considered a serious and major art form in France. BDs are not throw-away culture to the French, but held in pretty high esteem, reviewed in all the major French publications, and considered “the 9th art”. We might be letting our own attitudes towards comics distort this story. If French teenagers spent the money on pop music instead, would we get the same headlines?