A French author's singular take on America's pluralistic cultural life - by Alan Riding
Martel, 39, a former French cultural attaché in Boston, has set out to change this. In "Culture in America," a 622-page tome weighty with information, he challenges the conventional view in Paris that (French) culture financed and organized by the government is entirely good and that (American) culture shaped by market forces is necessarily bad.
"My first idea was to compare France and the United States," he recalled, "but when I arrived in America, I realized things were much more complicated. The United States is a continent, and you can't compare a continent with a small country or a decentralized country with one that is highly centralized."
As a result, this book deals only with creativity and arts financing in the United States. But perhaps surprisingly, given the mixture of fear and disdain that American culture stirs among many French intellectuals, his approach is not polemical. He neither defends nor attacks the United States; he simply describes the American way of culture.
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