Frédéric Martel is a French writer, researcher and journalist. His most famous pieces of work are The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968, Mainstream, "Smart" and De la culture en Amérique, a book about cultural policies and industries in the United States, which was featured on the cover of the New York Times art section in 2006. NYT's journalist Alan Riding wrote : "In Culture in America, a 622-page tome weighty with information, Martel challenges the conventional view in France that culture financed and organized by the government is entirely good and that culture shaped by market forces is necessarily bad".
Biography
Frédéric Martel holds a PhD in social sciences and several graduate degrees in philosophy, political science and law. After being project manager for the French Embassy in Romania and the French ministry of culture ; and being advisor to the former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, he served the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, deputy-Prime minister Martine Aubry, as one of her political senior advisors. From 2001 to 2005 he was cultural attaché for the French embassy in the US. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University and New York University. He wrote, or currently writes, for numerous publications and produces its own radio show, "Soft Power", a weekly live talk show on the entertainment, the medias and "the internets" for the French national public radio stationFrance Culture. He is also editor in chief of the Internet-based cultural magazine nonfiction.fr and a columnist at Slate. Additionally, he has had high-level academic activities by giving conferences in major American universities, universities in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Hong Kong, China, Japan, India, Egypt and by teaching, from 2005 to 2014, at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris. In 2008–2010 he was a researcher for the French Foreign Affairs' Analysis and Forecasting Centre and he founded the research web site of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel concerning creative industries and medias around the world. From 2012 to 2013, he was a senior researcher at IRIS, Institut de Relations Internationales & Stratégiques. Since 2014, he is a senior researcher on culture and the internet at ZHdK University in Zurich.
Books and TV documentaries
Frédéric Martel is the author of nine books:
Philosophie du droit et philosophie politique d'Adolphe Thiers, LGDJ, 1995
The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968, Le Seuil, 1996
Theater, Sur le déclin du théâtre en Amérique et comment il peut résister en France, La Découverte, 2006
De la culture en Amérique, Gallimard, 2006
Mainstream, Enquête sur la guerre globale de la culture et des médias, Flammarion, 2010
J'aime pas le sarkozysme culturel, Flammarion, 2012
Global Gay, How gay culture is changing the world, Flammarion, 2012
Smart, On the internets, Stock, 2014
In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, Bloomsbury, 2019,
Yves Jeuland's movie Bleu, Blanc, Rose was based on Frédéric Martel's The Pink and the Black and Frédéric Martel has also codirected the documentary De la culture en Amérique with Frédéric Laffont and Global Gay with Rémi Lainé.
