Culture Council notes total destruction of amateur art. Minister worries.

There are private initiators who offer amateur art practice and cultural education without any form of support or with a minimal contribution. These initiators have proven they can do a lot themselves but they are struggling due to lack of practical, facility support. Find these people and see what you can do to support their initiatives. In my experience, sharing knowledge amounts to a lot of talking; better to provide practical support. Storage space for costumes, rehearsal space and an affordable stage, for example.

Ah what crocodile tears. That was obvious from the start, wasn't it?
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A thousand bombs and grenades! Who woke up the new RVD?

Pension accrual? Disability insurance? I didn't even know t existed, yo!!!! Ah well, everyone complains, but there are nice things about making your profession your hobby, aren't there?!!!?

A self-employed person in the cultural sector

CULTURE.
A note.

A complex set of intangible achievements and conceptions of norms and values that have gained their substance in every society through a shared, long history. The norms are often laid down in laws, the values are mostly unwritten but all members of a community share them to a large extent. We all more or less organise our lives along the written and unwritten rules that belong to the culture to which we ourselves want to belong.
Because norms are enshrined in laws, they can be enforced; after all, violation can be punished. It is different with values; what we share with each other in these comes much more from within; is internalised, the result of everyone growing up in the culture of the society we were born into. But most norms are also internalised. We obey laws not just for fear of punishment, but mostly because we perceive them as right. It is not the letters on the paper, but our deepest sense of right and wrong that makes us live (mostly anyway...) by the laws prescribed by our common culture. A law that is not perceived as right by a society can only be enforced in a police state. It should therefore be clear that the feeling of being part of a community plays an all-important role in everyone's willingness to conform to its culture. It is precisely this shared culture that binds a society into a true unity.
The knowledge of our culture is not an innate matter of course but the result of education and training. And precisely the latter is constantly under pressure because it does not seem to serve an immediate economic interest. Seems, because while economic prosperity may benefit a community in the short term, in the longer term its culturally determined cohesion is an absolute necessity for its survival. The blurring of that cohesion has disastrous consequences in the social sphere; it undermines the sense of solidarity and devalues people into isolated individuals who should only pursue their own economic interests. A lack of togetherness disintegrates a society.
Some politicians claim that our culture is threatened from outside by "non-Western" influences. However, I fear much more erosion from within: the refusal to invest sufficiently in cultural education that prevents young people from learning about the cultural legacy of the past, a legacy that is actually extremely important for their future as part of the community.
Time and again, economic motives appear to play a very big role in this, a dangerous way of short-term thinking. A thriving economy is a tool that should serve the welfare of a society and not the other way around. It should never become an end in itself to which a society should submit. The latter, however, seems to be occurring to an ever-increasing extent, as evidenced by the overriding importance attached to it and the choices that administrators in particular make in this regard; culture is mostly a marginal balancing item.
One example: where the budgets of projects such as the Betuwe railway line and the construction of the HSL were exceeded by hundreds of millions without much objection, an impending deficit of a few thousand euros on a culture budget is enough reason for political fuss.
Granted, our prosperity is a great and important achievement. But true wealth cannot be expressed in money alone; material prosperity without spiritual well-being is hollow. Financial prosperity is usually an individual achievement, cultural prosperity that of the whole society. The factor, then, that binds us together as part of it.

MUSIC EDUCATION AND SUBSIDY
A note.

Many places in the Netherlands offer music lessons to young people at a music school. In addition, a large number of private practices exist where children (and to a lesser extent) adults can acquire the skills needed to play an instrument. Music schools are in most cases financially supported by the local or provincial government, where private practices operate independently of subsidies. So, especially in a time of austerity, it is attractive for governments to put this form of cultural education in the hands of the private sector; a saving of many thousands of euros seems to be an easily realised budgetary advantage.
However, there are many arguments against such a policy. Most of the arguments are familiar: a private practice denies any form of control over the level of lessons offered or the lesson objectives set, the competence of teachers is not guaranteed, affordable rates are only possible with very short lesson times or combinations of pupils in large groups, private practices lead to impoverishment of the supply, there are hardly any possibilities for playing different instruments together, the continuity of lessons is not guaranteed, and so on. Moreover, training as a qualified music teacher becomes particularly unattractive if it only leads to an insecure and poorly paid existence in a naturally unpredictable commercial market, which in the longer term will lead to an acute shortage of well-trained teachers.
Within a certified institute like a music school, these problems do not arise.
But there is another important reason to be highly critical of the privatisation of music education. Music is an important form of culture and plays a very important role precisely for the target group of that education, children aged 9 to 16; it is one of the means by which adolescents in particular define their identity.
Unlike music schools, private practices are commercial institutions. Teachers are not each other's colleagues but each other's competitors, and therefore benefit from the most customer-friendly policies possible. For commercial success, it is necessary to match the lesson content as seamlessly as possible to the students' wishes; in practice, this means that the student determines the lesson content. And the average student, as noted earlier, is a still young, searching adolescent who lacks the education needed to arrive at a considered judgement on the whole of our musical-cultural heritage. Adolescents have a strong tendency to follow the musical fads of the day, a phenomenon that commerce cleverly capitalises on. Music in the hands of commerce generally leads to a disastrous flattening, as an example I refer to the music that can be seen and heard on commercial TV channels like Veronica, RTL and SBS: superficial, eroticising pulp that contributes nothing but absolutely nothing to the cultural education of our youth. Content-rich pop music, world music, jazz and classical music play an extremely marginal role in the commercial offer. With commercialisation of music education, I fear the same course of events: mainly focus on vacuous trendy pop tunes and the disappearance of music that has more depth from lessons. A disastrous erosion, therefore, of an art form based on a long cultural heritage.

However, good music education can play an important guiding role in this. Instruction given by competent, trained teachers who are able to give direction to the musical content of the lessons, even if some of the genres or pieces of music covered are not immediately popular with young people. To educate and train is to pass on experience and that sometimes means overcoming resistances. Resistances that commercial institutions prefer to avoid.
In my opinion, good music education is only possible if the lesson goals are set by people with a vision matured by education and experience, independent of commercial self-interest. Support from the government is a prerequisite here, on the one hand to make music lessons accessible not only to a small financial elite, but especially to guarantee the substantive quality of those lessons. After all, subsidy also means the right to interfere and thus the possibility of retaining some control over the process. That process: the cultural education of young people is an investment that, in my opinion, more than justifies the price paid for it.

Working together and sharing successes. No.1you don't become No.1 alone. Big egos must conform servile to a common goal. Aiii....and ask that of musicians and soloists....

As a result, the amateur now often thinks he is a professional and the level of art in NL has gone downhill. I would like to see amateur art preserved of course, but I am afraid that supporting the amateurs and not supporting the pros will lead to a totally impoverished level of cultural life in NL... Nowadays, Jantje Smit is already culture.... How far can you sink...