Amanda Crabtree’s presentation explores the New Patrons Protocol proposed by the French artist François Hers in 1990, which urged for art to enter into the civic sphere by creating a platform for citizens to commission artworks in response to the needs of their immediate environments and communities. Under the protocol, individuals and groups were able to assert the raison d’être of art through the commissioning of new artworks, thereby activating a network of artistic and cultural production—from artists, who devise the form of the work, to cultural producers, who establish the various links required to bring together the knowledge and expertise needed for the realisation of the initiative, to elected political representatives, to funders, who supply the wherewithal to act and whose support show that in a democracy, the responsibility for art can be entrusted to civil society. While recognising the complexities in implementing socio-political shifts, Crabtree calls for a reconsideration of the convictions and prejudices on which present-day cultural policies are based. To recognise the capacity of civil society to fully assume its responsibility in the development of art is, at the highest level, a political choice.