Well-timed gift from Bussemaker

Rijksmuseum Twente can probably stay open now that culture minister Jet Bussemaker (PvdA) has promised the chamber to halve the planned 50% cut in operations. Moreover, she is going to fight hard to keep the Cultural and Artistic Formation subject in secondary education as a compulsory examination subject 'left or right', and will look for money to also extend the culture card beyond August 2013. The chamber will receive a letter on those matters in spring.

This year's culture budget debate had an entirely new tenor. Until now, it was VVD and PVV who scolded many culture lovers and creators in an often honourable tone, and usually rather careless in their views. Now almost the entire chamber was looking for ways to make amends with the cultural sector, which has been hit twice as hard by cuts as any other sector.

It started 'old-fashionedly', with speeches by veteran Martin Bosma of the PVV and newcomer Venrooy of the VVD, who - fraternising side by side - told the chamber that money for art really should be something of the past, and that the goal was to stop subsidising art altogether in the foreseeable future. Bosma's interjections, which used to include a joke here and there, were this time only harsh (also in volume) and intimidating. He could not make the accusation that the PvdA now supports art policy that that party fought hard against for three years, allowing SP-er Jasper van Dijk to then head in that PVV mess ball with a graceful bow. The PvdA's new culture spokesperson Jacques Monasch clearly still had some trouble with Bosma's invective, but did not have to fear his blanks.

Also notable was the input of the CDA, with new culture spokeswoman Mona Keizer. She opened her speech with a few quotes from Alain de Botton, a philosopher who preaches mild atheism worldwide. She was concerned with the need for policy with a vision, and as Alain de Botton writes, but she did not quite pick up on, art is eminently capable of taking over religion's old monopoly on moral authority. That could have made for another fun philosophical debate.

But hard against hard did not continue. Minister Bussemaker went looking for ways to do something about the harsh policy of her predecessor Zijlstra, and came up with this at the right moment, just when everyone in the museum sector had already left the public gallery and the building in disappointment. That it remains sad for Loevestein and Huis Doorn, and that the Metropole Orkest can now only whistle for money, has thus faded into the background. The little present, which we were all secretly expecting from the press, has done its job.