During Ingrid van Engelshoven culture regained some respect from the Chamber. How next? #culture debate

He will not be thanked, the headline above this article. After all, if there is one thing you don't want, it is to give a minister of a Rutte cabinet a compliment. And certainly not one of culture, the sector that, under Rutte's 10-year premiership, suffered the heaviest blows in post-war history. Rutte is the prime minister who imagined the culture sector as something with 10 people in row one.

Cultural debates in the Lower House, I followed and covered them for Culture Press for 10 years, are wondrous gatherings. That's a bit down to Thorbecke, who once said that art should not be judged by politics. So The Hague is not about the content of culture, but only about how it is facilitated in the Netherlands. This means that debates on cultural policy are among the most unfathomable in the Lower House. It is also why, in the Netherlands, it is almost always about culture as a lubricant in healthcare, neighbourhood management, social issues, emancipation of the region and heritage.

File knowledge

Cultural spokesmanship is not a main task in many parties. File knowledge, especially on the right, is absent. From a small party like newcomer BBB, this is conceivable and even endearing. During the debate on Monday 22 November, it turned out that the successor of the Farmers' Party had not even browsed through the papers: the party wondered why some art was subsidised and others not, and whether they had anything to say about it. After which Ingrid van Engelshoven explained, with remarkable patience, that the principles of the policy are set by the Cabinet every four years, and that the House decides on them.

Whereas the far-right nationalists of the PVV, through Martin Bosma, talked for ten years about Zwarte Piet and the preservation of Afrikaans, and the CDA was mostly endearingly on the rural agenda, and now, under Lucille Werner, is betting on accessibility, it was mainly the VVD that stood out for its enormous dedain for everything to do with art and culture.

Hardliners

In the end, that line lasted Halbe Zijlstra eight years. During 2019, the tone changed, and spokespeople who actually had a connection to the creative sector arrived. We have already forgotten their names, by the way. Culture is still not a career portfolio in the VVD.

Yet the tone of the debate changed. Whether that can be credited to culture minister Ingrid van Engelshoven is impossible to say now. It did happen while she was minister. The atmosphere around culture changed, and that certainly took some getting used to for the old hardliners within CDA and VVD.

Tough guys

In the end, the corona pandemic brought a striking reversal. After initial hesitations, at least the financial support for the hard-hit cultural sector was very generous: earlier, it became clear that per capita, the Netherlands allocated just about the most money to help the cultural sector. It did not always end up where it was supposed to, and it did not go wholeheartedly. After all, even with the first aid pledge, the sector was put at a disadvantage compared to seed potatoes and cut flowers, and Hugo de Jonge's DVD will not soon be forgotten by many people in culture. Moreover, flex workers and self-employed people in culture are heavily affected.

The tough-guy tone of Rutte cs is also still persistent, but it seems that for a few months now the female voices in the cabinet have really been listened to, and so that female voice is also the voice of the cultural sector, even if it says 'eeh' more often than is nice to hear.

Political appointments

The question remains whether we should want art and artists to be discussed in the Netherlands as respectfully as in our neighbouring countries. One important reason is that the role of politics in arts policy there is much more substantive. Boards and managements are often politically appointed, and the city council in cities actually interferes with the content of the cultural sector.

In the Netherlands, such substantive interference is unthinkable. Ingrid van Engelshoven once again warned of the consequences during the debate on 22 November: dictatorships in particular abuse it. And yes, the only parties in our country willing to speak out about art in terms of content are on the far-right and openly fascist side of the political spectrum.

Corporate art

Yet it is worth considering, because the technical nature of our cultural policy, which is never about content and value, but always only about official preconditions, does not help to reduce the distance that many people feel towards art. Moreover, more than in our neighbouring countries, the art sector is extremely focused on meeting all kinds of conditions, which change every four years with the political colour of the government. Art itself has become almost as commodified as the policies that sustain it.

Sometimes I dream of a meeting room where people are clashing with each other with their ideas of the clean, the beautiful, the good and the ineffable.