Active Participation in European Cultural Policy

A critical reading of the Sector Blueprint and Culture Compass

#10 THE CONDITIONS OF RECOGNITION: CULTURE BETWEEN CONTEXT AND CIRCULATION

By Giorgio Bacchiega

In current cultural policy debates, attention focuses on how cultural value is demonstrated across
different policy domains. However, a different question emerges if the emphasis shifts to the environments in which artistic expressions are recognised as art. These environments matter because they allow us to engage with fictional worlds without immediately translating them into the moral expectations that structure everyday communication. When the boundaries of these environments become blurred, as increasingly happens in digital settings, the same expressions continue to circulate, but it becomes less clear how they are meant to be understood. What is at stake is whether the conditions that allow the arts to remain recognisable as an autonomous sphere can still be preserved.

THE AUTONOMY HYPOTHESIS
Cultural practices are often treated as if their meaning could remainstable across different settings. However, meaning has always depended on shared interpretiveconditions that guide both production and reception of the arts, shaping how an expression isapproached. This assumption is visible in the introduction of the Sector Blueprint, which describesculture as a space where people can inhabit fictional worlds and imagine lives beyond their own. Such a description presupposes environments in which experimentation and symbolic distance are possible, creating situations that can be experienced without being immediately reduced to moral or political alignment, as in works that are meant to provoke.

Historically, theatres, galleries, concert halls, festivals, and similar spaces have established a tacit agreement between artists and audiences. Entering these spaces means adopting a different form of attention. Audiences accept in advance that they may encounter discomfort as part of the aesthetic experience, and what might appear inappropriate or offensive elsewhere becomes interpretable within a shared cultural frame. This suspension of immediate judgement is one of the conditions that make pluralism sustainable: democratic societies depend on the presence of spaces where disagreement does not immediately harden into polarisation, and where conflicting perspectives can coexist long enough to be reflected on. Cultural spaces have historically played this role because they allow ambiguity to remain open before interpretation is closed by fixed moral or political responses. For this reason, where artistic freedom, digital culture, and security policy meet is one of today’s most delicate frontiers of cultural regulation. All three are indispensable: artistic freedom protects imagination from repression; digital policy secures connectivity and openness; security systems protect against manipulation and disinformation. Yet if these demands come together without clearly defined boundaries, they risk producing conditions in which cultural expressions become difficult to interpret.

As artistic works increasingly circulate through hybrid environments, the interpretive conditions that once guided both production and reception become less sharp. Here, cultural forms appear alongside advertising, political messaging, activism, entertainment, and information, often detached from the contexts that once gave them meaning. At this point, audiences no longer encounter artistic expression as participants consciously entering a cultural space, but as users moving within environments shaped around a sense of immediacy and continuous communication. Once cultural expressions leave the safe spaces that traditionally framed them, they begin to carry different meanings.

THE DECONTEXTUALISATION TRAP
This aspect becomes evident in the way both the Culture Compass and the Sector Blueprint approach digital environments. The Culture Compass places strong emphasis on harnessing digital technologies and AI for the cultural and creative sectors, repeatedly framing innovation, competitiveness, visibility, and economic growth as strategic objectives. Concerns surrounding copyright, remuneration, and generative systems are acknowledged, yet they largely appear within a framework oriented towards market positioning rather than towards the interpretive conditions under which cultural meaning emerges. However, digital environments create a more complex situation than policy language acknowledges, governed by visibility, acceleration, and algorithmic optimisation with consequences on the conditions that allow cultural expressions to be recognised and, therefore, interpreted as cultural expressions at all.

The Sector Blueprint similarly situates digital culture within broader concerns surrounding connectivity, resilience, and security, particularly in relation to disinformation and foreign interference. Here, the ambition to defend artistic freedom encounters a structural ambiguity. The same conditions that allow artistic works to circulate freely across contexts also make them increasingly difficult to distinguish from persuasion, propaganda, advertising, or manipulative communication. The problem is therefore no longer reducible to a simple opposition between artistic freedom and censorship. In environments where contextual frames weaken, the defence of cultural expression can unintentionally extend protection to forms of disinformation adopting artistic, ironic, or aesthetic forms. At the same time, attempts to counter manipulation may risk constraining legitimate artistic experimentation, including forms that express dissent as a core dimension of democratic culture. What becomes fragile is the symbolic differentiation that once allowed audiences to recognise when they were entering a cultural experience rather than an intervention aimed at persuasion.

This difficulty becomes even more pronounced in AI-mediated environments. The Culture Compass strongly promotes the development of AI strategies for the cultural and creative sectors, while Eurobarometer data included in the document shows a revealing contrast: Europeans express strong attachment to human creativity and concern regarding the impact of generative AI on artistic labour, yet the majority of respondents also report difficulty distinguishing AI-generated from human-created cultural material. What emerges is not only anxiety surrounding technology itself, but uncertainty regarding the conditions under which cultural meaning is recognised as a shared element of identity. When attention shifts primarily towards outputs detached from the processes and environments through which they were produced, culture risks becoming increasingly reducible to circulating products. But cultural practices are not reducible to objects to be consumed. They are also relational and interpretive processes developing within specific social, symbolic, and institutional environments. Once these environments recede into the background, recognition itself becomes weakened.

THE CIRCULATION CONDITIONS
The issue here is not nostalgia for institutional framing, but the relation between process and product. In current digital contexts, artistic expressions increasingly appear as content among other forms of content, subject to the same logics of visibility and optimisation. Traditionally, cultural works have always circulated beyond formal spaces, and democratic societies depend on broad accessibility, but a major problem arises when circulation occurs without conditions capable of preserving interpretive differentiation in such a breadth. Without such differentiation, ambiguity becomes difficult to sustain, as every expression is immediately drawn into informational, moral, or political interpretation.

This creates a growing difficulty for cultural policy itself. The question is no longer only how to protect artistic freedom, but whether environments still exist in which cultural expression can remain recognisable and defensible as cultural expression. For instance, digital public sphere largely dependent on commercially governed infrastructures struggles to preserve these distinctions, since visibility is organised through economic priorities and algorithmic incentives that remain largely opaque to public scrutiny. For this reason, defending artistic freedom today requires infrastructures capable of sustaining contextual differentiation and interpretive plurality beyond simply opposing censorship.

At stake are the conditions through which cultural participation becomes possible at all. Public and private infrastructures shape the environments in which participation takes place, influencing what culture becomes, who gets to practice it, and under what conditions. These elements do not operate separately but form interconnected configurations that extend beyond any single policy domain. It is within these broader configurations that the question of cultural ecosystems begins to emerge.

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This series is intended as a critical yet constructive contribution to the Culture Compass debate, exploring where active participation challenges existing policy assumptions and where new frameworks may emerge. Future entries will address participation versus access, indicators and measurement, and the place of grassroots practices within European cultural ecosystems.

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Consulta Periferie Milano is a network-centric platform (formally a second-level association of undertakings or association of associations of undertakings) formed by 36 cultural, charity, trade, visual and performing arts organisations, cultural centres and local newspapers active in the peripheries of Milan with the purpose of drawing constant attention and find original solutions to the problems of the multifaceted peripheral landscape of Milan in cooperation with academic, political and societal forces.