President of France wants a report on art residencies’ strengths and weaknesses and suggestions on restructuring to attract “great artistic talents from all over the world”
President of France Emmanuel Macron. Source: Wikimedia
President of France Emmanuel Macron has charged a senior civil servant with reassessing state-funded art residencies. The move may result in abolishing some programmes. The official who will work on the report is Thierry Tuot, the president of the administrative council of the French Academy at Villa Medici in Rome.
According to Le Monde, Macron wrote Tuot a letter, saying that his primary aim was to make France more attractive for “great artistic talents from all over the world”. He underlined that the government spends over €7m annually on around 500 residencies in the fields of visual and performance arts.
Tuot is expected to establish “a map of [the] residencies, public and private”, identifying their “strengths” and “weaknesses”. “A national system for selecting artists” will subsequently be established, involving “if necessary, the reorientation, the creation or the withdrawal of residency programmes according to the strategic objectives of the support of the state”, the Art Newspaper reports.
Macron also asked Tuot to reassess programmes in the Villa Medici in Rome and the Ateliers Médicis at Clichy-Montfermeil outside Paris, where Tuot is also director of the board.
The deadline for the report is September 10. Tuot declined to comment on the issue to Le Monde.
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