Daan Roosegaarde for president? Alderman? Councillor?

Jet Bussemaker believes in Daan Roosegaarde. She confessed this on Sunday 1 September during the traditional Paradiso debate. She admired his courage to imagine the unthinkable and his drive to come up not with opinions but with proposals. Her message to the arts sector, again almost fully present in Paradiso, was clear: stop complaining, start doing something.

The political finale of this year's Uitmarkt was all about 'change'. Because that something needs to change is by now clear to the organisers of professional organisation Kunsten '92. The gap between politics and the art world was never deeper and wider than now, and Bussemaker's admiration for summer guest Roosegaarde actually demonstrates this perfectly. Moreover, in the final seconds of the two-hour debate, the comment of the culture councillor of Enschede, that more artists should enter politics, because politicians now don't understand anything about art.

She actually had a point there. Like previous editions, this debate perfectly demonstrated that politicians don't understand anything about art, artists or 'the creative sector'. In part this is because they don't want to, like most modern VVD members, in a larger part because they never come into contact with it in their daily practice. CDA coryfee Mona Keizer demonstrated this by arguing that art in museums should just be explained more clearly, and especially about how such a work of art was supposed to work. Otherwise, she argued, no government money should go there. The alderman of Rotterdam, who by now was rather better informed than a few years ago, this time wanted the arts to do a social cost-benefit analysis, just as was done for sport. A typical case of 'not paying attention for a moment' the past four years, because then there were about 10 of those cultural cost-benefit analyses per week appeared.

Politicians' ability to look back is thus even less developed than their ability to look forward, and with this they oddly find Daan Roosegaarde on their side again. During the most memorable summer guest broadcast in an already memorable summer guest season, he said he never looks further ahead than three years, because what comes after that is totally unpredictable anyway. He illustrated this beautifully with a report from 1999, in which modern people, those types who now all walk around with a mobile phone to their ear, proclaimed from the bottom of their hearts that they would never, ever buy such a thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u0RQk2Z1-o

But should someone like Roosegaarde go into politics to creatively boost the sleepy mess in the lower house or the municipal council chamber? I sincerely hope not, because the man's ideas about an ideal society are not very uplifting. He likes hyper-self-organising ant colonies, and as biblical as that may sound, ants never give me a very warm feeling when it comes to self-expression and freedom.

What politics needs is not more artists, but more people steeped in the need for creative fulfilment. Those people are now afraid of being called elitist, as supporters of sport would think in a country where extreme obesity is the social norm. Politicians should, in short, dare to think for themselves a bit more again. Before you know it, an artist with strange ideas the lot over.