What Is at Stake in the Interaction between Media Arts and Cultural Industries in Lebanon

between media arts and cultural industries in the current Lebanese art and cultural scene, ranging from an established and conservative art that refers to tradition and embraces the forms and contents of its time to a culturally resistant art that experiments with new forms and messages. The latter is a revolutionary art invoking novelty in opposition to the former conception of art, specific to artists integrated into the milieu of instituted system. Indeed, conservative art in Lebanon is part of a vision that considers that in art, as elsewhere, the end justifies the means, to the extent that money and profit participate in the very definition of art. In this sense, conservative art is based on a practice of repeating preexisting forms of expression. Lebanese conservative art finds its value in economic criteria that prevail over symbolic ones. In other words, a work of art is valued according to the profit it generates. This conception of art forms the basis of an eminently conservative art, which governs institutional art and is akin to stereotyping, a major characteristic of the products of cultural industries. On the other hand, at the antipode of the conservative conception, we see that artists in Lebanon have another conception or vocation of a social nature, whose intent is to preserve peace, reduce social disparities and facilitate dialogue between communities, cultures and religions even to positively change the human being and the world. But we also observe that various avant-garde or even revolutionary practices can maintain a certain bellicose state depending on the territorial context. I should emphasize here that this revolutionary idea of limiting the definition of art to a framework that only summons symbolic values while ignoring economic values, even resisting them, seems today to be an obsolete definition, requiring a reformulation in line with reality. Starting from the observation of these two conceptions of art and creativity in the Lebanese context, one can wonder where there might be found a productive collaboration based on equal opportunities between agents of resistant art and actors of conservative art who are more a part of the cultural industries. To answer this question, I should note that, at first glance, the divergence of these two antagonistic conceptions might seem problematic. However, this divergence could give way to a fertile convergence, in the sense that the intermediate products under the aegis of a hypothetical intermediate cultural policy would constitute the fruit of a symbiotic collaboration, given a new ground possessing its own organizational model. In this hypothesis, resistant art would not lose its intrinsic value, its authenticity and its integrity nor undergo a perversion in contact with established art and its commercial and conservative values. For their part, institutional art actors would not be losers in engagement with the world of resistant art, in the sense that the latter do not have to undergo an economic regression due to adoption of noncommercial practice. In order to try to resolve this conflict, we hypothesize that a new Lebanese cultural policy would develop a neutral ideology, indifferent in some way to progressive and conservative issues, without this indifference posing a problem in the realization of creative products. To test the validity and limits of our hypothetical neutral ideology, I consider what is at stake in the interaction between media arts and cultural industries in Lebanon. At the outset of this article, a line of questioning is induced by my dual studies in visual arts and cinema majors, my media arts and audiovisual practices and my work in Beirut as a university instructor in these two fields. How do arts agents come into play in the world of cultural industries in Lebanon and vice versa? It is necessary to document and understand what could give rise to tensions and conflicts but also to notice the negotiations between collaborators from these two studied worlds, starting from the idea behind the creative product, followed by its production and ending with its circulation. Indeed, these two worlds share some similarities regarding the production of content with a strong social and creative dimension; the tools of the digitization of information bring them closer together. What is central to such research is the articulation of three levels of analysis of the interaction between the media arts and the cultural industries: