It could have been so beautiful. In a not so grey past, the Council for Culture, then under a different management, initiated a movement that would give more authority to the region outside the Randstad. That was three years ago. Now there is a (perfectly justified) angry letter in the newspaper from the cultural deputies of nine provinces. They are demanding politicians put pressure on the Performing Arts Fund to bring more regional distribution into the subsidy.
Trouble is that politics has no say in this at all, except when it comes to opening or closing a money tap. As the fund itself points out, and here also repeated is: the fault lies with the ministry and the Culture Council, which have made a mess of their own policies.
Return for a moment to the jubilee year of 2017. The Culture Council had its ear to the ground with people who mattered, and came up with a piece we can now describe as visionary. A quote from the introduction: 'Cultural policy has a strong national orientation and is mainly focused on individual institutions and not on the cohesion of cultural facilities. In practice, policy and money flows do not yet sufficiently reinforce each other. The current covenants have not been able to solve this problem. But if regional choices become important considerations in national policy, then a discussion can start locally about the meaning and interpretation of cultural provision that really matters.'
Contradiction
So the Council said, in 2017, "let more money flow through the region, hand it over to political decision-making there and make the region more self-aware. What the Council managed to pull off in 2020, with its final grant recommendations, is 180 degrees contrary to its own 2017 principles.
What has happened in the intervening three years? This Council has lost its backbone, regularly ignoring its own advisers or sending them into the woods. This Council is now saddling the Netherlands with a basic infrastructure that is mostly about puppets and not infrastructure. It has been said and read, but minds are apparently confused.
I quote again from that vision from three years back: 'Several regions point to the uneven distribution of funds across the country. BIS- and fund-subsidised institutions are concentrated in the Randstad. Moreover, the lack of financial resources for cultural policy is at the top of the list of bottlenecks in almost all surveyed municipalities. The effects of the major budget cuts of recent years are working their way through. So in order to keep the fire going, wood needs to be added. Especially in the region.'
Friends shopping
So since 2017, nothing has happened, or actually things have got worse. Typical something that a strong Council and a minister with vision could have changed. Apparently, they were busy with other things. Talking about puppets: very shortly after the visionary phase, the previous director left the Council to become captain of the successful supertanker TivoliVredenburg, and the Culture Council began to sway. After a few bobos shouted that such a regional infrastructure would never succeed, sector analyses appeared that were no longer about the region. Those sector analyses also increasingly contradicted each other.
It was clear that direction was lacking. What was left was an exercise with regional profiles that everyone knew would end up in the bin. And so they did. The council then started shopping around in its own circle of friends and the list of lobbyists that it was good to hang out with.
Distrust
Now it is true that the people who now have a say in the arts sector see little point in the region having a much greater say in cultural policy. There is a lot of distrust of local and regional politics, and people doubt the cultural expertise of local government. Logical too, since 1986, when the current system was set up, it has only had to concern itself with bricks and mortar: the state provided the content. Now, if you suddenly start saddling an urban region with responsibility for everything, including earmarked cultural money of many tens of millions per city, you are guaranteed to get hassle.
The big question is mainly: what do you do with the expensive supra-regional things, such as festivals, that can never be paid from a city's budget? How do you balance those interests? Now I have mentioned before that politicians, especially those in local politics, can learn fast, and shift gears even faster. I would put trust first.
Arts Council
And then some. Still under the previous minister, Jet Bussemaker, a discussion paper circulated at the ministry that bore an even bigger revolution. Very briefly, that paper (in my possession), written by a civil servant who has since left, explores the possibility of setting up our own Arts Council in the Netherlands. Such an 'Arts Council' would be given the entire national budget to distribute, according to criteria and procedures to be determined by itself. Such a council would also no longer have to adhere to the four-yearly arts plans, with the four-yearly hoop-jumping actions of art institutions to comply with yet another memorandum of principles from yet another minister or state secretary. Politics would only deal with the total budget, so the rest would be up to the Council and the municipal authorities.
Such a move to bypass bureaucracy and unwanted political interference, which I am sure we will see wonderful examples of in the coming months: I would sign for it. Provided, of course, that you occupy such a national council differently than has happened in recent years, with remarkably many friends of a certain patronage in its ranks. Anyway: with more say for the region, local governments will have arranged a few solidarity tractors in no time to rectify that if necessary.
Something has to be done. Not for nothing did the same Council that is now acting so weirdly say it itself three years ago: 'Cultural policy is searching, inventing, forgetting and reinventing. Meaningful dialogue between municipalities, provinces and the state occurs incidentally. Governments therefore learn little from each other, and from themselves.'
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