What would you write about?

I approached the topic of culture from a specific angle, that of culture produced, on the one hand, and consumed, on the other, by Europeans. The effects of the crisis that began precisely in 2008 were not anticipated in my research. But I think I can say that there are not substantial effects, either on the production or the consumption of culture, that can be directly linked to the crisis. Just as, moreover, I had shown with respect to the great crisis of 1929. However, if I were to add something to the book, it would of course concern the dimension reached in this decade by the Internet and social media. There certainly have been unprecedented developments there. The most important development lies in the fact that today more and more people have direct access to production. And they have less need than in the past for the mediation of commercial institutions, such as publishers and film companies. Today each of us can make a film almost at no cost and then convey it on the Internet. It may not have a large number of users, and perhaps the quality of the production will not always be very high. However, when I think about the fact that today facebook has one and a half billion users, it is clear that we are facing a breakthrough, and time will tell whether it is really as relevant as it is announced to be. But the crisis, in my opinion, has little to do here. There is, on the contrary, the continuation of a development that in 2005, when I finished writing the book, could not have been predicted with such impact and such speed.

So, both the production and consumption of culture know new directions of travel. But always, can the crisis gripping Europe, and resulting in its growing social impoverishment, curb this prospect?
People, it is true, have less money, because of the crisis. But I do not see a reduction, because of this, in the production and consumption of culture. Today, more books are sold than ten years ago, more films are seen on television than ten years ago, more music is listened to, and more easily, than ten years ago. So there has been an increase, not a contraction, in cultural consumption. Perhaps there is a lower growth rate in absolute terms, but there is still a growth rate. So we need to make another argument. And that is that there are at least two categories of cultural goods. One that we receive for free, and the other that we have to pay to receive. What we receive for free, in reality, is never completely free. We pay for it, in the way it is distributed, through advertising. And advertising, we may not like it, but for a hundred and fifty years now it has been one of the means to reduce the price of cultural goods.
While in the 19th century the profile of the cultural consumer was not well known, today with new technologies this profile tends to become even more personalized. And a part of the not insignificant amount of advertising is moving towards Facebook and other media tools. At the expense of what? At the expense of more traditional means, such as the press. So much so that the paper press is in full crisis, while the internet press is growing. The Guardian, I’ll give an example from my country, today has fewer readers, or rather sells fewer copies of the printed newspaper, but if we move to the internet it has a million visitors. This is therefore the discussion that needs to be made. The number of consumers is not decreasing, but the means of producing culture are changing enormously, there is a rapid, disruptive passage from one form to another.

In your analysis you show that Europe consumes culture more than it produces, importing it so to speak from the United States to a large extent. Is this a lasting trend, or can the growing competition from other players on the geopolitical scale, such as China, change its direction?
As a historian by profession, I try to avoid, as much as possible, making predictions for the future. Partly because I don’t know what will actually happen, partly because it’s not true that history helps us predict the future. I can say, however, that at the moment, it doesn’t seem to me that China is capable of spreading its cultural products at a level even remotely comparable to that of the United States. The Chinese films that arrive in Europe today, for example, are usually of high quality. They probably aren’t huge successes even in China itself. You can make a comparison with the film production of the 1950s and 1960s, when Italy produced more films than any other European country, but the vast majority of these films that proposed Italian-style comedy were perhaps seen in some Mediterranean countries, and weren’t very successful abroad. The Italian films, on the other hand, that were successful in the world were the elite ones, they were the films of Rossellini, Visconti, Bolognini.
China, at the moment, exports more films than anyone in the world, including the United States, but if we talk about popular culture it must be said that, up to now, it is not comparable to the influence that America continues to have. It must also be said that it is not so simple to give a national connotation to cultural products today. In reality, the more cultural products travel, the more they abandon the national connotations that produced them. Today every cultural product can be easily imitated and adapted. Let’s take the American song of the forties and fifties, rock and roll. When we say that it is an American product, we are referring to the fact that it was born in a territory included in the United States, but the music as such is a mixture that is influenced by Africa, or Ireland for example. And when it is then relaunched in Europe and adapted to national tastes (Adriano Celentano in Italy, Johnny Halliday in France), it is American music of course, but it is no longer just American, it also becomes something else. This is how culture is nourished. It travels from one place to another and always acquires new characteristics.

In your opinion, are we moving towards overcoming the distinction between mass culture and elite culture?
I don’t see that we are moving towards an overcoming, if anything this distinction is even stronger today. I would like to say something that is very important to me, and that is that this distinction is not objective, no one can set themselves up as the supreme judge and establish what is high culture and low culture. The distinction is made by the intellectual classes, who proclaim themselves as part of high culture. Not all intellectual classes, of course, and within this same elite there are continuous disputes; therefore, it is a phenomenon that is always in motion. But it is a distinction, and a definition, promoted first of all by elite culture. If we take an example of a type of culture that is completely different from the type of culture we are talking about, cooking for example, we notice that here too there is a distinction between high and low cuisine. But who defines one and who the other? Those who can have access to both. The same can be said for fashion, which is constantly changing. The argument is the same if we refer to the detective novel, often distinguished between high-class detective novels and lower-class detective novels. It seems important to me that, from the historian’s point of view, we remain firmly anchored to the analysis of those who make the decisions to define culture as one type rather than another. Culture exists as such. High culture generally exists because it is defined as such by high groups.

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