LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Francois Barre : Curating the Arts for a Nation Delighted to Spend on Them

When the French government opened the Georges Pompidou Center 17 years ago, it wasn’t sure how people would react to the odd design, which resembles a giant cube with blue exterior beams, and its smorgasbord approach to culture.

But few French governments have lost gambles on this nation’s passion for the arts. And 26,000 people a day come to see the Pompidou Center’s National Museum of Modern Art, 550,000-volume library, 110-language laboratory, architectural “creation” center and acoustics-research institute or to shows at its cinema, theater or concert hall.

While Americans debate the wisdom of spending taxpayer money on the arts, the French government, despite a 12.6% unemployment rate and a real need to cut state spending, seems always to be coming up with ways to spend more.

The French Culture Ministry recently unveiled a new “Cite de la Musique,” which includes a music museum, concert hall and institute for the study of music and choreography. A new national library, the last of retiring President Francois Mitterrand’s grand projects, is being built. And the Pompidou Center itself is due for a major $110-million renovation and face-lift, to be finished by the turn of the century.

The person in charge of this, as well as the center’s annual $100-million operating budget, is Francois Barre, an affable, 56-year-old administrator who has spent his career in various jobs in the arts, both inside and outside of the government. He has worked for French culture ministers from both sides of the political spectrum.

At the Pompidou Center, Barre works out of a large, airy corner office, with his hundreds of employees barely hidden in a maze of partitions that cover a room the size of a football field. Barre has spent much of his career in the architectural arts, and he professes to adore the controversial exterior of the Pompidou Center. But the open-office plan inside is “unbearable,” he admits. He’ll be moving the administrative offices across the street when the renovations are complete.

Not surprisingly, Barre sees the growth of state-sponsored arts and culture as a healthy feature of French society. He noted that when the Pompidou Center opened, there were five museums devoted to 20th-Century art, three art centers and no large institutes of music research. Today, there are 20 modern art museums, 30 art centers and 10 institutes devoted to music research. “I love competition,” he says. “This can only be considered progress.”

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Question: The Pompidou Center is one of the most popular places in France, right?

Answer: The most popular in France--and in the world. We had 8 million visitors last year. That’s two times more than the Eiffel Tower.

Q: And almost as many as EuroDisney.

A: (Laughs) But is that a cultural outfit, EuroDisney?

Q: No, and it’s certainly not a state enterprise, either. Which leads us to ask how the French government can spend such large amounts of taxpayer money--nearly $3 billion last year--on the arts?

A: First, there is a tradition. We have always believed . . . that anything that enhances education, knowledge and creation is a public service--in the same category as health services or the fire department.

So, people consider this something owed to all citizens. We may have economic inequalities, but there is a minimum which must be our common heritage and must be accessible to all citizens. Public financing guarantees that knowledge, education and access to culture and creation is equally accessible, in a way that the laws of the marketplace don’t permit.

Q: Does it also reflect the tenor of the times?

A: I think so. People say we live in a period of a crisis of values. There is no more ideology. A sense of the sacred is absent. There are increases in unemployment and social exclusion. In that atmosphere, culture is not a luxury but a factor of social connection, of identity and of community relationship.

What is the most painful thing in any crisis period? It is the loss of identity, the loss of social connection. And culture makes a social connection.

Q: In the United States, many taxpayers would be reluctant to spend so much public money on art when the same money could be spent on solving urgent domestic crises or inequalities. Why doesn’t the same feeling prevail here?

A: People are right to say it’s necessary to spend the maximum for unemployment. I’m not an economist but I imagine we in France also spend much more on unemployment than on culture. It’s not even 1% of the overall budget.

But one must remember that cultural investment also creates jobs. There is a part of creation that gives rise to cultural industries. So, one cannot act as if everything which is dependent on culture is something which doesn’t create jobs and which doesn’t have an economic reality.

Q: If the state pays for the creation of art, then aren’t the artists, in a sense, “official” artists?

A: That is a serious error, and it’s a mistake many Americans make. In the French tradition of state-financed culture, there is never pressure. I have been in this business for, I don’t know, I started here, in decorative arts in ‘68, so I’ve been around a while. And I don’t remember anything ever being imposed.

There was a press conference in New York not long ago, and there were journalists who asked me if the process of developing the exhibition program at the Pompidou Center was free. And I didn’t understand the question.

What they meant was: Was it me who decided on the exhibition or was it the minister who told me that it was necessary to do such or such exhibition?

Never has a minister in France--whether he’s of the right or of the left--telephoned a director of a public establishment, a cultural establishment, to tell him: “You must stage this play or present this exhibition.” This never, never, never happens.

Q: But, of course, when the state buys art doesn’t that interfere with the free market for art?

A: It does prevent the free market from acting completely. It’s true that this has an influence from the aspect of certain artists and of French artists.

But, must one say that the only scale of the artist’s value is the law of the market? I’m not sure of that.

Q: So who decides what is good and what is not good art in France? The consumer or the government?

A: That is a question for every country. What does the conservator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York do? He asks himself the same question. How does he do it? He does the same thing as a conservator of a French museum. He does studies, he has a part of subjectivity, he knows the international scene and then he makes choices--which are arbitrary choices, of course.

So, this depends on domains. In a domain such as art, for example, the judgment is not conditioned by the market. The conservators of the museums in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and elsewhere do exactly the same thing as all conservators in the world: They make subjective choices.

And say we’re going to exhibit (Cy) Twombly rather than someone else. It’s because we consider that Twombly is a great artist and someone else isn’t.

Q: Does the size of the audience determine whether that choice was a good one?

A: It’s complicated. People do try to compare these choices with a good or bad reception by the public. And sometimes, someone may say: “But why did you do this exhibition of such and such artist; there were so few visitors.”

But the cultural domain, the realm of creation, is different from the economic domain. In the economic domain, demand conditions supply. If we think a consumer is going to like something, then we produce it.

But in culture, it is the opposite. The law of supply alone must function. And we all know of very great artists who were very unpopular in their time.

Q: What about in the case of movies?

A: It is here where the French have the greatest conflict, for example, with the United States. If we let things function solely by way of demand, given the high costs of creating a movie, after a while only films for teen-agers will remain.

This is a problem. Television, in every country, tries to respond to the viewers’ demand, which, in general, is nil from the cultural point of view.

Q: But when the state is financing so much of art and culture, doesn’t that open the state to criticism?

A: Yes, of course, because it’s the taxpayers’ money. It’s normal for the public to be more critical and more demanding toward a public institution than toward a private institution.

So this means that when one displays things that don’t attract many people, or that people end up not liking, it’s necessary that the citizens consider that this is part of the functioning of democracy that permits artists to be shown even if it is not what they like.

If some individual spends his own money, he does what he wants. But I’m not sure that people in that case will take the maximum of risks, because, of course, it is their own money. And the adventure of art, it seems to me, is taking the maximum of risks.

Q: In buying, especially modern, art for the Pompidou Center, do you have to confront much criticism?

A: There is always criticism, of course, not so much on the purchases, because the people who decide what we buy are specialists. And the general public knows what we show but not always what we buy or how much it costs.

But there can be negative reactions to exhibitions. We had an exhibition which just finished and was called “Hors de Limite” (Out of Bounds). There were very violent articles against the exhibition in the newspapers of the extreme right. Some people wrote to the minister of the interior to ask if this exhibition would be forbidden to minors, which we refused to do, obviously.

We warned the public in saying that visiting the exhibition could shock the sensitivities of young visitors. But I find reactions from people normal.

Q: Another thing that surprises Americans, when the government changes here--either the right or the left--it doesn’t affect the cultural environment.

A: It’s true. It’s a part of the tradition. Because we don’t have a presidential regime in the American sense of the term and because we consider that there is a continuity of the state. Some things in France are impervious to political change.

Q: Is this what the man on the street wants?

A: I think that there is a consensus on cultural policy.

For example, we are entering a period of presidential election campaigns, and the country’s future will be debated almost daily. I’m sure that what is going to distinguish the candidates is not the cultural question. For culture, there is always a consensus.

Q: What do you think of the reduction in subsidies for art and culture in the United States? Do you think it’s dangerous?

A: I think that today--and here I’m not talking about the United States, I’m talking about the entire world--we are in a period of regression, of increasing moral order, of political correctness, of a fairly chilling period and a period of crisis because of the economic situation.

There are no more collective projects. Thus, in this period, there is a moral order which settles in. But this is a danger for everyone. As much in Europe as elsewhere.

Q: On questions of art and culture, many Americans find the French arrogant and perhaps too convinced that their approach is the only correct one.

A: They are not completely wrong because the French often believe themselves to be very intelligent, and they are not necessarily. It’s like that. The more uneducated the French are, the more they believe that they are more intelligent than anyone else. So they are often intolerable.

Everyone has his faults.