A cultural malaise has quietly eroded the West’s confidence in its creativity, reshaping how art is funded, judged, and understood.

The bureaucracies that govern cultural life today are fundamentally uninterested in cultivating any proper sense of what art is, what it is ‘for’, and how new creations converse with the canon. We are governed by a post-cultural state, a regime in which art is increasingly mediated through managerialism. The post-cultural state prides itself on ‘access’ and ‘impact’, while culture itself withers on the vine. When the state and its great museums cease to act as reliable stewards, the result is significant material loss: works stolen, vandalised, or left to decay. In theory, the state still funds and celebrates culture, but only insofar as it justifies cultural ‘performance’ in terms of economics or ‘outputs’. It is a triumph of management over meaning.

At the core of the post-cultural state is a cultural malaise that has quietly eroded the West’s confidence in itself: a faltering faith in its roots, its traditions, and, above all, the idea of aesthetic excellence tout court, a celebration of what lifts us above the bleakly material, our consolation against mortality. Artworks are no longer prized for their mastery, their capacity to evoke wonder, or the quality of their dialogue with the virtues past masters have taught us to cherish. Instead, often reduced to one-note acts of transgressive daring, they’re valued according to ‘impact’, or by the standard of the latest socially approved virtue.

And yet the state is no absent landlord in cultural life. Ministries of culture have proliferated across the West; quangos dictate and dole out funds, universities churn out disciplines devoted to ‘theory’, and art is reduced to sociology. Scholarships and tax incentives are designed to prop up the ‘creative industries’. In Britain, the Arts Council wields portfolios worth hundreds of millions of pounds. France basks in the grandeur of its Ministère de la Culture. Germany’s Kulturstaat is a monument to state ambition in the arts. The United States sustains a labyrinth of foundations, libraries, and university museums.

Here is the cruellest paradox: under the guidance of these mighty institutions, less – rather than more – of the valuable and enduring kind of art gets made. Why? The present dispensation is a radical mutation on a deeper genealogy of state overreach in cultural life, ably charted by Marc Fumaroli in his monograph L’État culturel: Essai sur une religion moderne. In his account, many European leaders over the centuries have mingled state planning and the administration of the arts. They sponsored new creations and were at least familiar with their own artistic traditions. They generally cultivated taste and believed in art’s symbolic power. It would be ridiculous to assume that the Medici family were mere managers in matters of art. Patronage lent its support to private academies, workshops and trade bodies that created, and then nurtured, organic, living traditions. This is a far cry from the top-down social engineering that characterises the post-cultural state. It governs rather in a spirit of cold procedure. In this new dispensation, cultural memory itself becomes an administrative inconvenience: too dense, too demanding, too slow.

This mutation has roots in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which did away with the ancien régime’s patronage networks. Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the revolutionary period’s sharpest chroniclers, comments, in the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), that ‘Democratic nations will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and… will require that the beautiful should be useful.’ In that context, art is retooled as a commodity, its value pegged to a consumer-driven mass market. Tocqueville observed that artists might still produce one-off masterpieces, thanks to a unique strength of character or a brilliant education. However, the general incentive tends toward mediocrity – that ‘which judges itself’.

This tendency has since been quietly absorbed by Western institutions. The new order assumes aesthetic sensibility can be made ‘useful’, and engineered through centrally planned policies, funding, and targeted interventions. No longer is taste elevated towards a standard of excellence, but rather it is deployed to promote ‘access’ as a programmable and measurable outcome.

In Britain, an iteration of this logic emerged under New Labour. What the French call ‘cultural action’ (action culturelle), a new domain of state intervention, the British state rebranded as the ‘creative industries’. In the rhetoric of the government’s policy frameworks, the artist is now a ‘creative entrepreneur’ and culture is a branch of the ‘knowledge economy’. This extends the managerial logic of the post-cultural state: citizens are remade as producers of ‘creativity’, art redefined as output, and the state recast as an investor and brand manager of a national ‘creative economy’.

Nowhere are the counter-productive effects of the post-cultural state clearer than when cultural institutions seek to appease protest groups. Because administrators do not have a clear idea of aesthetic standards and principles, they reach reflexively for identity-based metrics to use as bargaining chips. In the context of contemporary ‘multicultural’ societies, defined less by negotiated pluralism (modus vivendi) than by growing sectarianism, the implications of the post-cultural state’s failure to engage properly with cultural heritage are incredibly serious. When no common symbolic ground is preserved, and when public institutions abandon the task of positively articulating who we are, and where we have come from, culture ceases to create new associations and instead stimulates the polarisation it should, under ideal conditions, ameliorate.

Conservative pushback against these trends betrays just as shallow a grasp of what culture and genuine artistic excellence demand. Right-wing ‘influencers’, who peddle decontextualised images of ‘tradition’ – random portraits of saints, disembodied classical facades, the profile of a Greek hero standing in a vacuum – share the same fixation on performance over substance as the cultural ‘innovators’ they mean to criticise. In a curious paradox, the landscapes and aesthetic forms that conservatives romanticise, such as the Georgian terrace, the small-town square, or the artisanal workshop, are often preserved, celebrated and inhabited by their ideological opponents. In practice, many who claim to revere these things have built almost nothing in their image, still less the philosophical coherence or patronage required to sustain a living culture. Libertarians want to do away with cultural subsidies altogether and, in their righteous and ahistorical impatience for reform, argue that the state should leave culture to the whims of the free market. Yet serious art has always needed patronage. It will continue to need support.

The state simply cannot be agnostic about culture, precisely because culture is, or should be, the living expression of principles which sustain and nourish our way of life. It is a link to our past, and a powerful way to access the human condition. And it is precisely here that the post-cultural state has gone astray; in mistaking management for meaning, it smothers the spirit it claims to preserve. That is why cultural debate needs a radical revision: away from culture as process, culture as political performance, and culture without artworks. It should move towards aesthetic excellence, a refreshed understanding and use of the canon, a hunger for the superlative. Away from an artless wasteland and toward a second Renaissance.