The entire discourse surrounding art and society occupies the foundation I direct, yet it tends to look in only one direction: who produces, who funds, who consecrates, who mediates. The other shore is missing, and it is the most uncomfortable one: who receives, who feels invited, and above all, who does not. The audience for so-called high culture—museums, theatre, classical music, contemporary art—remains, decade after decade, suspiciously similar to itself.
The data leave no room for illusion. In 2022, according to Eurostat, in seventeen European Union countries, the cultural participation rate of those with the highest incomes was at least double that of those with the lowest. This is not a difference of nuance: it is a line that divides society. In Spain, the latest Survey of Cultural Habits and Practices celebrates the best consumption data in two decades, but the average headline hides the usual reality: that consumption is not distributed equally, and those who participate the most are usually those with the highest levels of education and income.
A foundation must understand that this inequality is not explained by money alone. If it were a matter of price, free admission would resolve it, but it does not: free museums continue to receive a predominantly educated and affluent public. Nearly half a century ago, Bourdieu identified the symbolic barrier, and it continues to operate with uncomfortable precision: not entering because one does not know it exists, or because one does not understand the code, or because one enters and feels out of place, scrutinised, 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—'it is not for me'—describes a lack of invitation. No one is born feeling alienated from a museum. It is learned. It is inherited. Familiarity with legitimised 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, it rewards those who already brought that familiarity from home, and confirms the estrangement of the rest. An open door is insufficient if the threshold is invisible.
The cultural sector has spent decades speaking of democratisation, of widening audiences, of inclusion. It has lowered prices, multiplied offerings, and engaged in mediation, communication, and activities. 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. Perhaps the honest question is different, and more difficult: not how to bring them in, but what would need to change for this to be theirs as well. Who decides what is programmed, in what language it is narrated, who is represented on the walls and who is only in the audience, if they are there at all.
The former preserves the institution as it is and merely widens the entrance. The latter 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 luminous and demanding conviction: that an audience is not earned by origin. That no one is alien to beauty, to the emotion of a work, to the vertigo of an idea, for having been born in a house 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 the cradle. A foundation that takes this seriously does not ask how many people came. It asks who felt invited, and works so that this list, one day, finally resembles everyone.
On the 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.