High hopes for France
Decentralisation and wider access to culture are high on
Aurélie Filippetti’s agenda
By Anna Sansom. News, Issue 236, June 2012
Published online: 05 June 2012
Aurélie Filippetti (right) has been appointed by France Moselle region’s deputy in
the legislative elections on 17 June.
François Dournes, a director at Galerie Lelong in Paris
Filippetti’s appointment is in line with the socialist
president’s commitment to “justice and youth”. She turns 39 in June, and is one
of 17 female members in prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault’s government.
Observers are wary of her lack of experience in the visual
arts, which has suffered cutbacks during the financial crisis. However,
Filippetti was in charge of culture in Hollande’s election campaign and was an
adviser on environment, culture, education and social issues to Ségolène Royal,
who stood against former president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. That year
Filippetti became deputy of the Moselle region in northeast France
A published author, she studied classics at the prestigious
Ecole Normale Supérieure. The daughter of a miner and former communist mayor,
and the grand-daughter of Italian immigrants, she supports the “fight against
the inequalities in access to culture”, she told Arte, the French-German
television channel. Speaking in April at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, she said:
“Our aim is to strengthen artistic education and democratise access to culture,
and re-launch… innovative policies in establishments like this to go and
seek people who don’t spontaneously go to museums.” She is also expected to
decentralise culture, rather than just focusing on Paris and France’s other big
cities.
Olivier Belot, the director general of Galerie Yvon
Lambert, says: “After Frédéric Mitterrand, who turned out not to have any real
conviction in our domain, we all hope for real consideration of public powers
of social and economic weight that represents art on a national and international
level.”
Her visit to the Art Paris art fair in late March has been
noted. “She seemed very curious and open to contemporary artistic creation,”
says Guillaume Piens, the director of Art Paris.
How Filippetti can enrich the French art scene partly
depends on how much she is influenced by her advisers. “Culture ministers have
such large fields that it largely depends on the advisers that she’ll
nominate,” says Marc-Olivier Wahler, the former director of the Palais de
Tokyo. “But given her age and her dynamism, I’m very optimistic about what
she’ll do for artists in general.”
The artist Laurent Grasso says: “It would be interesting if
she met artists because we are always represented by other people—critics or
museum directors or galleries.”
One issue vexing gallerists and auction houses is the new
government’s intention to increase value added tax (VAT). “The main undertaking
of the new government falls in line with the European plan—[but] VAT on imports
and the droit de suite [artist resale rights] constitute competitive handicaps
for the countries in the European Union in a context where competition with the
United States and Asia is growing stronger and stronger,” says Guillaume
Cerutti, the chief executive of Sotheby’s France. “The culture minister will
need the active support of the foreign affairs and finance ministers to make
the voice of France
This concern is echoed by the gallerist Chantal Crousel. “I
hope that Aurélie Filippetti will know how to make her colleagues at the
foreign and finance ministries understand that culture, just like research and
science, can bring richness to France
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