For those who like to be around art, politics has become a bit more fun again, since 15 March. Since the 2017 elections, Thierry Baudet has been in the House of Representatives. Thierry Baudet knows a lot about art, he thinks, and we will come to know it, too.
In fact, Thierry Baudet is the best thing that can happen to art in this day and age. We conveniently forget for the moment that embarrassing slip during his maiden speech in the House of Representatives, when he appeared to mistake the back of the jar of prozac for real Latin. Rather, let's focus on his attack on Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum last week. Those who want to reminisce, Radio 1 has saved the piece. However, Baudet has a bigger problem, which he still has to do something about if he does not want to be left forever ridiculed in history. That has everything to do with his education.
Propaganda
Politician Baudet argues that the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum is engaging in left-wing propaganda through five temporary exhibitions in one of its galleries. Temporary exhibitions in which artists are asked to reflect on refugees and populism.
Beatrix Ruf, director of the Stedelijk Museum, went too far, according to Baudet. The Volkskrant had heard from her the verdict recorded that she became especially aware of the need for this series of exhibitions after the TV debate between Wilders and Rutte. I quote: 'I hope that the experiences visitors get in these exhibitions will lead to more complex thoughts. That we as a museum can activate that there are other things that also need to be thought about in this day and age. Do we want to give up the achievements brought by the Enlightenment? And humanity, democracy, freedom, things we are proud of?'
Complex thoughts
In attacking the arts, the VVD has never taken a substantive stand. If VVD people already think that all artists are leftists, they will never say so out loud. Logical, because what else would you do with your art collection, your annual visits to TEFAF and your free tickets to the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Venice Biennale? In its wisdom, the VVD argues that only artgrants be a leftist hobby, and not necessarily art itself. Just as the PVV argues that Islam is a wrong hobby, but Islamieten may well be right.
If not Baudet. According to Baudet, the art shown in museums like the Stedelijk is without exception leftist. Because abstract expressionist and not realistic. And so this is where it gets interesting. According to Baudet, museums like the Stedelijk deliberately suppress and ignore the realistic art that the whole of the Netherlands supposedly yearns for. Art with a beginning, middle and end, musical pieces with normal melodies and plays with a proper setting.
Degenerate art
Anyone who opposes this immediately ends up in a whole series of Godwins, so Baudet wins that debate in advance. Not entirely illogical, by the way, that the debate between realists and abstract Nazis gets bogged down. The Nazis, but also creepy ones like Stalin and Mussolini wrote realistic, recognisable, larger than life art for. As a reaction to the horrors of the Second World War, such prescribed realism was banned by art critics, connoisseurs and collectors. Realism was worse in the war than the Telegraph, so you didn't want to be seen with that.
I am not expressing an opinion on whether a revaluation of realism in art is necessary or desirable. I do think it would be good if Baudet had taken the opportunity to tell what attracts him so much in realist art and 19th century neoclassical architecture. And by that I mean that he talks about his tastes, without falling into his political calimero narrative about deprived and degenerate art.
Such a story about taste and not political colour of art is of course quite difficult. Because with it, Baudet can only profile himself as someone who wants to look backwards. That goes against every economic, cultural and social characteristic of a society. Those who want to know more about this can delve into the work of another French sage, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
Bourdieu argues that people see art and taste as means of distinction. Cultural capital accumulated in this way is a way to climb socially. This is how you join an elite and keep yourself above the masses. Every time the masses catch up with you, you create a new distinctive cultural capital, which again puts the masses at a disadvantage. Within that mass is resistance to the elite from people who especially want to be elite themselves. Baudet opposes the elite that, according to him, sees realistic art as inferior. He would like to form a new elite himself in which realism du bon ton is.
The real reason lies in Rotterdam
In the world of science, however, there is more going on. Often this turns out to be more banal than science itself: conflicting egos, careers, reputations. And then we suddenly see where Baudet's conception of art really comes from: the Leiden Faculty of Law. In legal circles, it has for years lost out to the more modern law schools in Amsterdam, but especially Rotterdam.
There, at Erasmus University, a new law faculty emerged in the 1960s, led by none other than Piet Sanders. Leiden, the conservative stronghold at the oldest university in the Netherlands, suffered. Hatred grew. So did jealousy. And this was not only about student numbers, publications and buildings, but also about art. And therefore about people. Piet Sanders was a very big one.
Pete Sanders was, in fact, an art collector. Not a small one, either. Indeed, without Piet Sanders, the walls of Boymans, Kröller Muller and especially the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam would have remained bare. He sat at the table with hungry artists who became world-famous partly thanks to him. Sanders was a lawyer who became a professor and founded a rather progressive law school in the most progressive city in the Netherlands. And so he was on the Stedelijk's purchasing committee. His progeny and family are equally active in the art.
New nobility
The Sanders lineage comes closest to what you might call the new nobility in the Netherlands. No snoopers, but people above politics who have garnered equal respect on the left and right. Elite after the old Dutch model. Think: KF Hein, Fentener van Vlissingen. People in business who understand that the Netherlands is too small and has too few of its own resources to afford borders.
Such modern nobility holds a position of honour that the conservative scribblers in Leiden have yet to achieve. That resentment runs deep and will cause burps at every drink. Cliteur, who previously kicked another cultural dud into the world as Ashfin Elian, is full of bitterness towards the leftist boys in Rotterdam, who by now have long since ceased to be so leftist.
What does Leiden have left? Some columns in opinion magazines, and now a political party, led by a pretty boy sine nobilitate, as it is called in proper English. We would say untitled, something Baudet equates with many of the modern works of art he so detests.
So Baudet is a full-blooded snob. And that's because of Leiden. Who teaches him in the higher arts?
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