Secretary of State excels in inanity as cultural cuts rumble on

The Secretary of State for Culture and Education reiterated before the radio once again reiterated his view that when making cuts, it is good not to know one's field of work . As an example, he did not know who the painter of "The Scream" is (Edvard Munch) and brought up a definition of culture as a "grab bag": "The beauty of culture is, that everyone can find in it what he or she sees in it."

Let us see what this "distance from the field" means in the day-to-day practice of Dutch politics ...
First of all, the proposal for a central e-books library. That appears to be a cigar out of its own box, as "the money comes from the municipal fund". And then there is the lending rights of e-books. Nothing has been settled with the publishers and for convenience, the state secretary in his letter to the 2nd Chamber does not mention the whole word "e-books".

At Drenthe provincial states are going to heavily cut cultural institutions. Art and Culture Drenthe €280-thousand a year less, RTV Drenthe €500,000, Biblionet Drenthe €500 thousand, Drents PLateau €200 thousand, the CBK Drenthe €125 thousand a year less and is left with less than €30 thousand a year.

Drents Plateau, an institution for conservation and development of heritage and spatial quality, is already in dire straits, expecting a deficit of €3 tonnes this year. And an annual cut of €2 tonnes is now coming on top of that. And that includes RTV Drenthe; subsidy of €378 thousand will expire in the coming years, and on top of that, there will also be a cut that rises to €125 thousand in 2015.

The province North Holland makes the generous sum of €150 thousand available for "preserving cultural values in North Holland". That was once a few million.

While the Zeeland library in Middelburg has already heavily cut subscriptions to trade magazines/periodicals and purchased fewer books, it will be cut by €3 tonnes each year by the province until 2014. The library expects its collection to shrink by 1/3.

It seems like Gerrit Kromrij as early as 1982 possessed prophetic knowledge: "politicians of all parties lack any moral or philosophical worldview, any understanding of a cultural hierarchy, any sense of history and continuity. Blindly they stare into the future. Their scale of values is a pile of old rust, from which they pick up now this, then that."