Recent studies on peoples' cultural life (statistics on cultural habits and household consumption, semiological or sociological tests) have increasingly shown the importance of industrial cultural products in providing the largest number with access to the arts.
It can be said that the cultural life of the vast majority -intelligentsia not included -has been changed more in the last thirty years by "cultural machines" than in the last three hundred years. On one single evening in January 1978, an audience of 120 million Europeans listened to the performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Every year, over a million readers, listeners and spectators enjoy certain books, films and records. Every evening, in every country, several million people are reached by films or theatrical, musical, even literary performances.
However, cultural policy analyses in the last ten years have almost exclusively borne on the public authorities' endeavour made on the basis of a small number of institutions and have disregarded the quite considerable development of the cultural market sector.
Cultural access now is therefore composed of two concurrent, but parallel, phenomena that do not meet: on one hand, a cultural "explosion," a widespread and deep-seated change in the cultural life of different sections of the population considered in terms of time spent, household "cultural" amenities and cultural products consumption; on the other hand, the public authorities' growing awareness of the need to clarify and develop more rational cultural policies.
These two phenomena do not converge, because cultural policies have particularly borne on classical dissemination methods and have aimed at democratizing the institutions reserved until now to an elite; they almost