Down with that leftist art elite

Yesterday, the chamber made €10 million available for the arts. This brings the tally of government cuts to at least €190,000,000 still. This hard-won extra is the last that could be asked for. Everyone agrees, the new system has been definitively embraced. The protest has made itself redundant now that the compromise has been reached. And how hard we had to shout about it.

Joe Corré, son of punk great Malcolm McLaren, burned 5 million worth of punk memorabilia on 26 November. According to him, the only possible reaction to an exhibition celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistols' song 'Anarchy in the UK'. That anniversary was also reinforced with an endorsement by the Queen. Corré calls that the worst thing that could happen to punk: incorporation into the establishment. The fire in it, in other words. Because that's punk.

Life-saving

Gijs Scholten van Aschat, gifted stage performer and singer of pretty good Tom Waits covers, recently made a dramatic appeal to national politicians to once again show their faces at the Stadsschouwburg instead of the Toppers. After all, only in the theatre, only in the light of the great arts, is sight offered for reflection and the mind sharpened. He did so under the title: 'Arts can save democracy.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDIAZFCdqB4

He was allowed to come and talk about it on Pauw. I saw his performance and knew what question the presenter would argue: "What do politicians gain from art?" followed by an answer as inspired as it was redundant. So has the sector learned nothing from the hopeless debacle called Mars of Civilisation, which in 2011 permanently ended the last vestige of support for the 'higher' arts?

It seems not. Performing artists (especially they) have a relentless tendency to consider themselves far more important, learned and civilised than the audience they play for. They are there to educate the people and their representatives in civility.

Fortunately, the Dutch soldiers of civilisation are not alone in their delusion. In America, the art world was also rocked by Trump's victory. Virtually everyone had backed Clinton or an independent candidate. The logical place, it seems, for right-thinking people. But now it turns out that just under 50 per cent of US voters consider Trump and Breitbart boss Bannon to be right-thinking people. The first calls for marches of civilisation are now also sounding across the small (Brexit!) and big pond.

Irrelevant

Yesterday, the website Artnet released an interesting essay on the matter. The title says it all: Art Must Face the Lesson of Donald Trump's Election or Face Irrelevance[hints]The art world must face the lesson of Donald Trump's election, or settle for irrelevance[/hints]. Author Ben Davis reiterates how the entire art world, along with the established media, is in a bubble. Within that bubble, everything is relevant: you write a piece in the NRC, talk about it on Pauw, play about it night after night in venues around the country and really have no influence whatsoever on the course of history.

Here Davis makes a nice link. The same bubble appeared around Bertolt Brecht's work in the Weimar Republic, and in the Brazil of around the 1964 revolution. At that time, too, left-wing artists like Augusto Boal were fully part of the mainstream, but like everyone else in their circle, they were powerless against the populists who eventually seized power. What happens, according to Davis, is that art, especially socially and politically engaged, humanist art, may well experience highs during times of great opposition from the far-right or populist quarters, but those highs take place in a framework closed off from reality. Eventually, art that points to its own importance will be mercilessly overwhelmed by the forces of popular discontent.

In this day and age, that growing divide is visible as never before. No one can say they have not seen or heard the anger and rebellion: Facebook is full of it, Twitter is bursting at the seams. The newspapers are writing about it.

Borders closed

You really can't use art as a tool against all this hatred, fear and thoughtlessness. Art is not meant for that, but especially not strong enough for that. Indeed, I know plenty of artists and art lovers who feel they have good reasons to agree with extremist parties. Not only do they go down on their knees for Geenstijl&co, but they themselves think it is a good idea when the Netherlands becomes Muslim-free, when one group imposes dress codes on another, and when the borders close to everything else.

Against polarisation you do little. To do something against the powerlessness of what I call sensible people, every lover of nuance and humanity, be they artists, gardeners, bakers or journalists, will have to consider how to break their own bubble. Not by crying along with the wolves.

If artists, as free spirits, as people we have paid to be creative and contrarian for a while, can do something, it is to show us that way. Punk did that, in 1976. Hip-hop did that, in 1983.

We must start by smashing our own windows. Down with the establishment.