‘Successive interventions have stripped, juridified and amended the BIS and the state funds. But more importantly than that, trends and developments in and around cultural life are making new demands on the cultural system. It is out of date in several respects.' So says the Council for Culture in today's 'exploration'. This sets out the contours of the future of cultural policy in the Netherlands.
In that exploration, the council proposes that cities in the Netherlands be given a leading role in shaping their own culture. They should no longer be thwarted in this by the state and provinces, and by national cultural funds. These sometimes have an agenda that conflicts with urban interests. Starting with the new arts plan, supra-local institutions and the state only work as a supplement to the cultural policy determined by the city. The council assumes about 12 to 16 urban cultural regions.
From BIS to RIS
This so-called RIS (Regional Infrastructure) will stand alongside the BIS (Basic Infrastructure) which houses institutions of national and international importance. Think of clubs like The Concertgebouw Orchestra and The National Theatre, the Rijksmuseum and National Opera and Ballet. Those institutions will have greater security of existence, as their plans will henceforth be assessed every six years. The rest of the 'structural' subsidies will become less structural: they will be fixed for a maximum of three years.
This intervention will make arts subsidies less at the mercy of the political fads of the day. Until now, arts plans pretty much run parallel to the four-year political cycle. This damages continuity and encourages political arbitrariness. With the new subsidy periods, culture will become less of a plaything and more of a partner for the more or less local government.
Funds
What remains a tricky one is the position of the funds. Clubs like The Mondrian Fund for the Visual Arts and The Performing Arts Fund now have their own structure with their own dynamics, separate from the plans of central or local governments. These funds, too, will have to adopt a more following attitude. What this will mean for the position of the national middle category, with groups like Orkater, has not yet been worked out.
What is nice, but obviously terrible that it has to be, is the council's requirement for artists' remuneration. Funds will have to take into account institutions' operations and overheads in their grant allocation, but certainly also fair remuneration for all workers involved.
Guts
For the first time in years, the council is showing vision and guts. Although you could also say that the council now has the chance to do that which should have been done six years ago but was not achievable. More importantly, there is a serious attempt to ease the bureaucratic pressure on the arts sector. Minister Van Engelshoven herself hinted at this during the culture budget discussion, on 13 November. Now it is indeed the case that a disproportionately large part of the human and financial resources at arts organisations is spent exclusively on submitting and tracking grant applications to funds, state and region, all of which have their own requirements, their own dates and their own decision moments. The Council is now dreaming out loud about it To relieve that pressure.
The piece presented today is, of course, not yet a final policy. It is an exploration. But it is an exploration that, for the first time in a long time, puts an optimistic dot on the horizon. That gives hope.
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