Imeanwhile, the website has been updated, but since this post prompted that update, we are leaving it up.
Always good to support a new initiative. That's why we also welcomed the constructive plan from Rotterdam's Erasmus University and the former art newspaper NRC Handelsblad to organise a symposium on new art funding. After all, the government wants to get rid of art subsidies, and instead of opposing it, you can start thinking of alternative solutions. Smart, good and entrepreneurial.
To wit.
Then we read the explanatory statement and it says the following:
The arts have never been preoccupied with generating revenues and visitors, but rather in realising social and artistic values. Does your proposal take this into account? And could cultural organisations learn from the market? Does the Internet provide opportunities? What is there that we can change about copyright on artistic works? Could people be convinced in any way to appreciate, and hence pay for, art?
You read it correctly. We translate: 'In the 25000 or more years that man has been making art, it has never been concerned with generating income, let alone reaching an audience'. Nicely meant, of course, but the authors of this little text thereby ignore the tax and festival system of the ancient Greeks, the begging letters of Vincent van Gogh and the many bread paintings of such luminaries as Rembrandt, Rubens or Caravaggio. No, rather NRC Handelsblad and Erasmus University, together with the VandenEnde Foundation, persist in the image of the artist popular with VVD and PVV as a lazy, backward-looking nun who only wants to make things that he or she likes and who has nothing to do with the public or money.
The final death blow for art comes in the last sentence: Could people be convinced in any way to appreciate, and hence pay for, art?
Probably blinded by the fact that indeed fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for news printed on thin paper, and arriving late in the mailbox, people extrapolate their own misery to the arts. After all, people have always been, and will always be, willing to pay money for art. That the amount of money from citizens' wallets is often not enough to pay the salaries of orchestral musicians, ballet ensembles, monuments and theatre actors who have to play any Shakespeare without dimes is another story. Those in power over the centuries have always paid for that. Whether their name is Franz Joseph or Rockefeller.
Still a touch white-hot with anger at so much stupidity, we say: go rinse your keyboards, NRC, University and Foundation, for so much egregious ignorance. And then come up with a proposal that does matter.
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@winfred Figures were in TM in 2009 accompanying a story on declining interest in reviews. Related to NRC's own reader survey. Was positive, as AD art attracted only 0.03% of readers.
Nuance though that NRC's 0.3 per cent art readers are among the important group. Conscious readers, ticket buyers, book orderers. Big announcements also usually yield sold-out houses. They still participate, but it is declining fast.
Then again, I am curious what recent research has shown that only 0.3% of NRC readers save the Arts page. Does that mean that only that percentage reads the page or that percentage opens the paper on that page? Or something else? And who has quantified that?
@Klamer, thanks for your chivalrous response to our editorial blog. We are rather on the fence when it comes to the funding scene around the arts. Moreover, we ourselves are busy all day shaping journalistic innovation (our noble mission, for which we also receive support), and so we follow anything that smacks of revenue models and brilliant ideas about money from unexpected quarters. Just yesterday, we shot one off, which the NL embassy in London was then a bit sour about, but the said model offered too little value for money to the civic patron.
- On twitter, people wondered who these experts might be and what the prize entailed. Perhaps another tip of the hat about it?
@Jan Willem: Nice by the way that you are a namesake of our Rotterdam classical music contributor. No family?
- Furthermore: see Klamer's response: 'preoccupied with getting revenues and visitors' that really cannot be replaced by 'strongly focused on making profits', because revenues means revenue/income and not profit. and those visitors: no artist doesn't want to be visited. It's too idiotic even to have to explain that here. So: do what you have to do, change that text, it is wrong. Just like that phrase about people's appreciation and willingness to pay, because it is also pertinently untrue. Check the figures. Art is not a newspaper.
- On that note: We have been growing steadily by 200 per week for six months now (100 on twitter and 100 on facebook) and have thus acquired (with 2600 and 3500 friends/followers respectively - status 1 February) enough critical mass to do our bit: more real readers than the art supplements of the major newspapers, according to the latest survey, which indicated, for example, that only 0.3 % of NRC readers save the art page.
- The wording on copyright is extremely vague. Also in the response. So should also be over, if you don't want to get an institution like the FLA all over you. 🙂
- So yes, we'd love to be there and keep us posted 🙂 .
Touche. In the rush, the text is not as we would have liked it to be. Now the interpretation of "preoccupied" is debatable. After all, what is it all about in the arts? But to claim that preoccupation with money never happens is nonsensical.
That said, the art world could show more creativity in generating revenue and realising the values of its work.
Fortunately, this is the text on the website. So that is easy to correct. Anyway, thanks for the alert response.
Any ideas for other, original ways to fund the arts? We keep coming back to you.
Well, a little less firm tone is also allowed, of course.
First of all: thank you very much for paying attention to this initiative. Nevertheless, I would like to take the opportunity to add some nuance.
"The editors" protest the lack of any sense of history at Erasmus University, at the NRC Handelsblad and the VandenEnde Foundation. I can say something about the EUR, as I am doing the master's programme in Cultural Economics & Entrepreneurship there.
We know about the existence of Rubens, van Gogh and ancient Greeks. Instead, we say "The arts have never been preoccupied with generating revenues and visitors...". I still think this goes together just fine. After all, the English word "preoccupied" means "strongly focused on". Thing is, it says that the cultural sector is not focused on generating profits and sales. This seems a fair thing to say. The sector is not strongly focused on making a profit. Or do you think it is?
@Marcel Hoekstra: "What is there that we can change about copyright on artistic works?" is a question that hints at research being done on the downsides of copyright, such as, for example, the administration required to become economically wiser of the legal protection as a rights holder and the limitation it imposes on consumers since they have to incur a lot of search costs to value an artistic product.
The editors of course welcome them on March 22 to speak their hearts out.
Sharp analysis!
However, I would also like to know how to read the phrase: "What is there that we can change about copyright on artistic works?".
Fri.
Mho
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