The entire conversation regarding art and society—the one I have been pursuing in these texts and the one that occupies the foundation I direct—tends to look in the same direction: who produces, who funds, who consecrates, who mediates. The other side is missing, and it is the most uncomfortable of all: who receives, who feels invited and, above all, who does not. Because the audience for so-called high culture—museums, theatre, classical music, contemporary art—remains, decade after decade, suspiciously similar to itself.

The data leave little room for illusion. In 2022, according to Eurostat, in seventeen European Union countries, the cultural participation rate of those with higher incomes was at least double that of those with lower incomes. Double, at the very least. This is not a difference of nuance: it is a line that divides society. And although the latest Survey on Cultural Habits and Practices in Spain celebrates the best consumption figures in two decades, the average headline conceals the usual reality: that this consumption is not distributed equally, and that those who participate the most are usually those with the highest level of education and the greatest income.

What is interesting—and what a foundation must truly understand—is that this inequality is not explained solely by money. If it were a matter of price, free admission would resolve it, and it does not: free museums continue to receive a predominantly educated and affluent audience. There is a barrier that Bourdieu identified almost half a century ago and which continues to operate with uncomfortable precision: the symbolic barrier. Not entering because one does not know that it exists, or because one does not understand the code, or because one enters and feels out of place, watched, ignorant, in a space that seems designed for others. The sensation, difficult to measure but easy to recognise, that this is not for me.

That phrase—“this is not for me”—is the one we should take seriously, because it does not describe a lack of interest: it describes a lack of invitation. No one is born feeling like an outsider to a museum. It is learned. It is inherited. Familiarity with legitimate culture is transmitted at home, at school, in one’s environment, long before anyone buys a ticket. When an institution opens its doors and expects the public to arrive on its own, what it is actually doing is rewarding those who already brought that familiarity from home, and confirming the alienation of the rest. An open door is not enough if the threshold is invisible.

And here is the part that compels me to self-criticism, not applause. The cultural sector has spent decades talking about democratisation, expanding audiences, and inclusion. It has lowered prices, multiplied offerings, and engaged in mediation, communication, and activities. And yet inequality persists, because we have often treated the problem as if it were one of marketing: how to bring in those who do not come. That question, however well-intentioned, leaves the centre intact. It assumes that what we offer is correct and that we only need to convince the absent to approach. But perhaps the honest question is different, and more difficult: not how to bring them in, but what would need to change for this to also be theirs. Who decides what is programmed, in what language it is told, who is represented on the walls and who only in the audience, if they are there at all.

The difference between the two questions is not rhetorical. The first preserves the institution as it is and merely widens the entrance. The second accepts that the problem may also lie within, in what culture we offer and from what authority we decide that this is what deserves to be offered. Cultural democratisation fails when it treats the absent public as a deficit to be corrected, and begins to function when it understands it as a symptom that the legitimacy to define what is culture is poorly distributed.

I do not write this from a place of discouragement, but from a conviction that seems both luminous and demanding: that the public is not earned by origin. That no one is a stranger to beauty, to the emotion of a work, to the vertigo of an idea, for having been born in a home without books. Culture does not belong to those who inherit it: it belongs to those who find it, and finding it should be a right and not a matter of birth. A foundation that takes this seriously does not ask how many people came. It asks who felt invited, and works so that that list, one day, finally resembles everyone.

On open conversation

This text is part of my sub-series Art and Society, which examines with honesty, and from within, the real conditions of cultural work; here, how vocation is used to cheapen the work of those who possess it, and whom it leaves out. If anyone wishes to intervene from the sociology of work, the economics of culture, or the labour organisation of the sector, the notebook remains open.

Sources

Ministry of Culture. Survey on Cultural Habits and Practices in Spain 2024-2025.

Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979. (Spanish ed.: La distinción. Criterio y bases sociales del gusto, Taurus.)

Jancovich, Leila. “The participation myth”. International Journal of Cultural Policy 23, no. 1 (2017): 107-121.

Hadley, Steven. Audience Development and Cultural Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.