Anthony Heidweiller: Secretary of State, come up with a Delta Plan for a fundamental place of art in society.

Excellency,

You shared your new vision for cultural policy in a letter to the House of Representatives on 23 May this year. Your vision is about recovery, renewal and growth and you propose to shape it along five lines, leading to a sector that is healthy, strong and resilient again.

Just the thing! Your vision gives me confidence!

You take culture more than seriously and you intend to invest more time, money and knowledge in it every year. In particular, the letter also touches me with your concern for the people behind the scenes, the production managers, sound people, stage builders, who had to move en masse to other professional environments when the corona pandemic broke out. For it is precisely these people I would partly refer to as the foundation of the cultural sector, and it is precisely these people who are hard to find at the moment. Now that we are back in full creation and production mode, we are running into the understaffing of this profession, and we realise how important this profession is for the development and survival of the cultural sector.

Corona pandemic and foundation!

No one has linked these two concepts more poetically and elegantly than Ramsey Nasr, first during his interview on the Buitenhof programme on a Sunday morning in spring 2020 and then in his subsequently published essay The Foundations. The arts should no longer be the ornament but the foundation of our society, he believes.

He asked the crucial but also painful question: why were artists not invited to participate in the coronacrisis deliberations?

We are now two years into the pandemic and trying to get back to 'normal' as soon as possible. Yet we should be aware that there is quite and big chance that the arts sector will have to close its doors again in the autumn, or maybe even as early as this summer.

I would therefore ask you to consider adding another sixth line (including a financial reservation) to your vision of cultural policy, namely: Delta Plan for a fundamental place of art in society.

One part of that line could then be the Arts Sector Pandemic Response Plan. Where, how, with whom and when can the arts sector get to work during a pandemic to grab and showcase its fundamental role.

For how painful it was for everyone working in or involved in arts and culture to have to conclude in April 2020 that we were apparently not practising a 'vital' profession. And in what a stark contrast is that observation then to the words in your letter now: 'Without culture, life becomes meagre, dull and pale, Without culture, inspiration, fun and connection are missing. And without culture we stand still.'How can we prevent the dramatic consequences of the pandemic in recent years, how countless colleagues working in the arts and culture world ended up in a financial horror movie, many were forced to retrain, how can we prevent those consequences.

Let's start yesterday with a fundamental dialogue with the entire arts sector, using the vitality and creativity of the arts as inspiration, both for the sector itself and for society as a whole. Our sector talking, thinking, participating, deciding! in good times and in bad times. Never be silent again ...

Kind regards,

Anthony Heidweiller