Luc Boltanski - Enrichment

This realignment of critical axes is particularly clear among artists themselves. Celebrity culture, highly publicized connections between famous artists and commercial brands, and the publication of rankings have established sharp lines between a handful of internationally successful artists, whose work is exhibited in museums of contemporary art and sold at the major art fairs, and everyone else. The latter continue to live – to subsist – for the most part by selling their works through galleries that have little or no access to the major fairs, by selling them directly or through local relationship networks (this is hardly a new practice), or else by taking advantage, like artists in the theater world, of efforts at cultural development undertaken at the initiative of local communities or on a regional level. The art world, like the worlds of popular music, cinema, and sports, has thus come to symbolize inequalities in earnings, contrasting a very small number of ultra-beneficiaries – the stars – with a very large number of rejects. 92To prove this claim, one would have to be able to juxtapose an accounting of the total wealth distributed with the total number of individuals active in a given sector who are presumed to be in competition for the stakes. But the relationship itself depends on the way these totals are constructed, especially on the geographical level. This is why the contribution of famous artists – those whose activities are global in scope – to an enrichment economy is generally envisaged in a positive light only when the entity considered is the entire economy of a nation in its competition with other nations; this presupposes treating artists, and “creators” more generally, like brands whose name and “headquarters,” so to speak, must retain a national character.

As we suggested earlier, the case of the city of Arles offers an emblematic example of the transition from an industrial economy to an enrichment economy. After the decline of the dominant local industry, Arles turned toward tourism by promoting its rich ancient and medieval heritage. This transition crossed a new threshold in the early 2010s, with a shift toward culture and particularly toward contemporary art.

From the early decades of the twentieth century until around 1980, Arles was an industrial city. Its transformation from a provincial enclave began in the second half of the nineteenth century, when locomotive manufacturing facilities were set up for use on the lines linking Paris to Lyon and the Mediterranean; these shops came to play a major role in the city’s economy. By 1911, they employed 1,173 people; in the larger urban area, with some 30,000 residents, more than 5,000 made their living from the railroad. Forty-five locomotives were built in the region between 1908 and 1914. By 1920 there were 1,800 employees in the shops. Along with the railroad came industrial exploitation of salt: in nearby Salin-de-Giraud, the chemical company Solvay established a facility that manufactured soda from salt, chiefly for the soap factories in Marseille; it had 500 workers in 1925. Ship-building on the Rhône and metallurgy were also important in the region; machinery manufacturing sites in Barriol (a district in Arles) employed around 200 workers in the period between the world wars. In the 1930s, the metal-working company Constructions métalliques de Provence (CMP) set up shop in Arles and became one of the most important enterprises in town. In addition to these major businesses, there was a paper mill specializing in newsprint (most notably supplying the daily papers in Marseille), a shop that made cardboard packing boxes, and agribusiness factories that produced canned fruits and vegetables.

In the 1960s, 32 percent of the active members of the workforce were employed as laborers in industry (6,000 in 1962) or as employees in industries or businesses (2,000). In the 1960s, the proportion of middle-level managers and executives also rose (from 754 and 389, respectively, in 1954, to 1,075 and 616 in 1962). Conversely, handicrafts declined: there were fewer than 500 craftsmen in the early 1960s. The population grew owing to both increased birth rates and immigration: in 1962, there were 42,000 inhabitants, of whom 84 percent were “French by birth.” Immigrants from Italy, predominant in the first half of the twentieth century, came to work in industry; later, immigrants from Spain worked mainly in the rice fields in the Camargue. This workforce, chiefly laborers, was primarily male: in 1962, of 20,000 women, only 8,682 (24 percent) were employed, a proportion far below the national average.

The city’s industrial decline began in the second half of the 1970s, and factory closures multiplied in the 1980s. Most crucially, the railroad shops were shut down in 1984, and the metal-working factory CMP was downsized and renamed Constructions métalliques et préfabrication d’Arles: it maintained its boiler-making shops but had only sixty salaried workers. The local economy had already lost 2,000 jobs by the early 1980s, and the losses increased in the following decades (5,000 jobs lost between 1980 and 2000). For example, Rivoire et Carret-Lustucru, a rice-processing factory created in 1952 that had had 140 employees, ceased production after the floods of 2003.

This situation led to unemployment and poverty. In 2001, the number of recipients of financial aid from the government (in the form of “minimal revenue for insertion” into the economy, RMI) rose in the commune to 2,043, or 10.5 percent of the eligible population. With an unemployment rate of around 15 percent (the highest in the Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur region), for the most part, according to INSEE, “pockets of high economic insecurity” were concentrated in the city. Of the residents of Greater Arles, 27 percent lived in districts covered by “municipal policy”; these included large “sensitive urban zones” in which a third of the population had an average taxable income of 5,700 euros per household. The available jobs were primarily seasonal (in agriculture, especially rice and fruit harvesting, agribusiness, and tourism); they required little skill or training and offered very low wages. Economic inequality in Arles was quite pronounced, as tax data make clear: the gross earnings of the top 10 percent were seven times higher than those of the bottom 10 percent). 93In Arles, as in other regions, the industrial decline went hand in hand with the growth of the far right: Marine Le Pen won 25 percent of the votes in the 2012 presidential election.

In the face of this decline, the initial response was industrial, with noteworthy improvements to the port on the Rhône in the early 1990s, financed by the Compagnie nationale du Rhône: the goal was to provide harbor facilities that could accommodate 3,500-ton ships, and also to equip an industrial zone intended to support the installation of new enterprises on the site. However, only seven such businesses had been established by the early 2000s.

During the same period, the city of Arles sought to develop municipal activities in the arts, culture, and tourism. Hard hit by the departure of its principal industries, the city experienced major financial difficulties and had to find new resources. In the domains just mentioned, the city had what administrators call “assets” – masterpieces including ancient ruins (the amphitheater, the Roman theater, the Alyscamps necropolis) and religious buildings (the Saint-Trophime cloister dating in part from the twelfth century). Ninety-two sites from different periods have been included on the official list of historical monuments since 1976. But their power of attraction comes in part from the work of heritage creation that has been under way in Arles for more than a century. This work owes a great deal to the national recognition won by late nineteenth-century regionalist writers, especially Alphonse Daudet and Frédéric Mistral, who highlighted local traditions that had been revived in a spirit similar to the one that animated folkloric ethnography during the same period. These traditions were embodied most notably in the Félibrige association, which sought to preserve Provençal and establish it as a literary language. In this context, a number of folk festivals and events were brought back to life or invented. The heritage of which Arles can boast is thus constituted not only by ruins and monuments but also by the names of artists whose fame is associated with the city. Vincent Van Gogh, the most prominent among them, produced numerous paintings during his residency there in 1888 and 1889.