Kultura na rynku

Throughout its modern history, culture played, in succession, the role of a handmaiden of the nation-building efforts waged by the emergent modern states, and of a homeostatic contraption charged with securing a monotonous, undisturbed reproduction of social hierarchies and divisions. Both functions are currently receding, replaced by the services rendered by cultural offers to individual life politics in the individualised society of consumers. Among the consequences of that seminal functional shift are the dissipation of the ‘cultural canon’, as well as the new ‘cultural omnivorousness’ of the cultural elite, still a few decades ago defined by Pierre Bourdieu by the whimsicality and strict selectiveness of its artistic taste. Rather than through enforcement of norms and patterns upon the conduct of its objects of cultivation, culture of the liquid-modern society of consumers operates through temptation and seduction of its clients. The new function of culture and culture’s new mode of operation call for rethinking and revision of the meaning, purpose and strategy of ‘cultural policies’; this issue, particularly in its application to the state and non-governmental patronage of arts in contemporary multicultural societies, provides the contents of the remaining part of the essay.