The growth in the cultural sectors tracked by the Ministry of Culture and Communication is even more impressive if we consider it in terms of employment. According to the sources cited above, this sector employs around 700,000 people, or roughly 2.5 percent of the active workforce, and it has seen growth of more than 50 percent since the early 1990s (as contrasted with 16 percent for the workforce overall). This growth has been particularly apparent in the professions associated with theater and the other performing arts, stimulated by recent legislation governing intermittent employment (+95 percent), but it is also perceptible in the literary professions (+58 percent) and in the visual and graphic arts (+44 percent). In this last category, the increase in the number of people employed (+123 percent) has been very pronounced in the plastic arts, fashion, and the decorative arts (graphic artists, stylists, designers). But it is also noteworthy for painters (+21 percent) and photographers (+20 percent). In addition, the people employed in the various cultural sectors share basic characteristics that distinguish them clearly from the overall workforce averages. They are younger (47 percent are under forty, as compared with an overall average age of forty-four); they are more often employed in large cities, more often born in other European countries (an effect no doubt related in particular to the role of translators in the literary professions), and are generally from a much higher social class (49 percent have a father from a middle-class background). While these cultural professions employ increasing numbers of women (the proportion rose from 39 percent in the early 1990s to 43 percent in 2011), men remain dominant, especially in the fields of art and architecture, and the proportion of women is lower than in the workforce overall, where it has reached 48 percent. But it is especially in terms of educational level that the difference between people employed in cultural fields and the overall workforce, already considerable at the beginning of the period, has increased since 1991. In 2011, 44 percent of the employees in cultural fields had at least three years of post-baccalaureate education. Highest in the literary professions (66 percent), this quite elevated educational level is also often found in people working in professions to which access has long been less constrained in France by diploma requirements, for example actors (31 percent) and plastic artists (39 percent). Finally, we must point out one other defining characteristic of people working in the cultural realm, a characteristic having to do with their employment status. Nearly 30 percent have the status of independent (freelance) workers, triple the percentage of freelance workers in other fields, and even when workers in the cultural sector are salaried employees their positions are often precarious: 30 percent have short-term contracts – twice as many as the workforce average – and 26 percent work part-time, often less than half-time, and often with quite irregular work hours.81
In addition, the development of culture, unlike that of luxury and upscale goods, is not motivated primarily by export, because in most instances cultural commodities are not easily moved; they have to be consumed on site, as it were. This holds true of course for heritage sites, which cannot be moved, but also for a large number of activities – for example, the performing arts, art exhibits, and even literary activities – whose displacement is expensive in various respects, from transportation costs to the costs of insurance or translation. The most economical way to “export” such activities is therefore to import tourists.
The development of the various cultural domains has been driven by a significant increase in internal demand, a consequence of the considerable increase in the participants’ educational level over the last four decades. Between 1991 and 2011, the proportion of the workforce with degrees representing three years of post-baccalaureate study has doubled (to 20 percent). The proportion of household expenses devoted to cultural goods and services (not including the purchase of equipment such as computers) reached 2.5 percent of total household consumption in 2007, which corresponds to an increase of 23.3 percent over cultural spending in 2000; this is especially apparent in the area of theater and the other performing arts.82 Similarly, a study undertaken by Olivier Donnat on “French cultural practices” during the 1990s shows a slight but regular increase in attendance at shows and in visits to museums, historical monuments, and libraries, going from 4 percent for holders of a technical certificate (CAP) to 41 percent for holders of more advanced degrees. The proportion of individuals who had visited a heritage site during the past twelve months was 37 percent for people with higher education and 20 percent for those with a CAP.83 As Donnat suggests, the growth in cultural consumption is related to the increase in amateur practices, especially in theater, where these practices grew considerably during the 1990s among young people aged fifteen to nineteen, corresponding to the rise in the level of schooling.
The figures we have just mentioned, whether they concern the added value of cultural activities, the number of persons employed, or the level of consumption in the cultural realm, may appear relatively modest. But, beyond the fact that, as we have seen, they by no means include the entire set of domains that contribute to the formation of an enrichment economy, they also fail to take into account either the indirect and induced effects of these activities or their capacity to attract participants. The tendencies that these figures reveal may be more important than their absolute value. If we compare these data with the data characterizing the industrial revolution (a comparison that we shall develop more fully later on), it is useful to recall that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a vast proportion of the lower classes consisted of farmers, craftsmen, and servants (according to the historian Peter Laslett, at the end of the Old Regime in France, some 40 percent of adolescents in Western societies underwent the experience of domestic service);84 workers in large-scale industries were still only a small minority. This fact shows, retrospectively, the prescience of Karl Marx, whose analyses could be judged utopian in his day, compared to those of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for example. The latter, as Pierre Ansart has shown, was in a sense the spokesman for the aspirations of craftsmen, who were still a driving force at the heart of the working class.85
The art trade
There is probably no domain in which the commercial dimensions of cultural activities have given rise to more commentary since the beginning of the 2000s than that of contemporary art; trade in artworks has undergone changes that have attracted the attention of a growing number of art historians, critics, sociologists, and journalists. In this case, as in that of stars in the music business, in fashion, or in cinema, local cultural contributions to regional economies or to a region’s ability to attract residents has not seemed to interest the experts nearly as much as the global dimension of the phenomenon. This dimension entails what has been viewed as the formation of an art “market” unified from above, supported by a culture of celebrity on a worldwide scale – a market frequently described by journalists,86 art critics, and observers from the social sciences.87 The words used, especially in texts intended for a broad audience, evoke the vocabulary used to speak of “financial markets,” such as “trend,” “crisis,” “collapse,” “a killing” (as in the stock market), “boom”