'The spontaneous and creative initiatives and emergency solutions devised by creators and institutions during the current lockdown show that the sector excels in innovativeness.' According to the Culture Council, the solutions already being experimented with must be made available to everyone. The Netherlands' highest cultural advisory body considers this necessary if we ever want to move forward in the 'new normal' of the one-and-a-half-meter society. On how to achieve this, the Council today sent a letter to Culture Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven.
On what solutions there are, the Council is still fairly vague. Couldn't be otherwise, because those are most solutions what is being played with now, too. Drama on TV is - whichever way you look at it - a disaster to experience, Lowlands on a chess board with two-metre squares is no fun either. On the other hand, I also got wind of plans that are not only feasible but also typically Dutch and very future-proof, about which I'm sure more later.
So there are indeed still some things to be researched and that takes time. That is what even the subsidised art institutions currently do not have. The Council is asking for additional support for that, but is emphatic that the unsubsidised art institutions should also be helped.
One year's time
So the Council itself is coming up with a plan: give the institutions that will join the new arts plan 2021-2014, according to its opinion of 4 June, a year to find solutions for working in the new normal. To do so, they will have to radically revise their currently submitted and assessed plans. The Council is now asking the minister to give those institutions until summer next year to make that revision. Given that it is already widely assumed that the coming arts season should be considered lost, this is not a bad proposal.
The question of whether the current arts plan should be extended until at least 2021 - on which we previously the reports received - can be answered with a heartfelt 'no', in the Council's view. It would, especially given the Council's current approach, also be very unwise are. Quite apart from the fact that new elections will have been held by then, and everyone in arts land and beyond is scared to death that the Netherlands will massively choose a Brabant model.
Reshuffling
This is because, initially, it creates too much ambiguity. Suppose, for instance, that a club that is on the verge of grant termination comes up with the most innovative idea for a way out of the crisis, according to all the advisers who have not yet applied to any of the institutions they have positively assessed? Should you then reassess them? And what does that say about institutions that are now nominated to join the new arts plan with a big plus behind their application, but have no idea how to put their wrestling performance on a meter-and-a-half?
In fact, now is not a better time imaginable for a reshuffling of the arts plan than that very fourth of June, after which the new clubs can prepare for a new reality.
Farmers and highways
Of course, there is a lot to be said about this new reality. For instance, the Council now also advocates intensive cooperation with cities and (urban) regions. There must be money for that, that much is clear. The Big Four are asking for this themselves. So now it also remains terribly inconvenient that we are still left with a rather frenetically maintained system of nationally subsidised makers operating in city-subsidised houses. With in between provinces transferring money for culture to farmers and highways.
So it would be nice if the Council also took at least a year to actually adapt the whole system to the 21st one-and-a-half centuries.
Oh, and this: the institutions that are told on 4 June that they are out of the loop are of course doubly affected at this time. People who have to look for a new place then have nothing to fall back on. There was no answer today to my question about what the Council intends to do about this dire situation.
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