Melle Daamen is better on the pitch than in the paper

For Melle Daamen I cherish sympathy. And for a long time: from the time he visited me as a young VPRO director on his round of people from the world of culture. He came to ask for advice: how could he enter the sector? Because a job in culture was his ambition. So many years later, he passed me in the procedure for the directorship of the newly established Mondrian Foundation. My sympathy certainly did not diminish. I could sincerely agree with the application committee. I would have liked the job, I knew the sector well, brought experience and enough diplomatic ability. But Melle was fresh, rather than diplomatically stubborn and original and he was bound to shake up the still unmade bed immediately.

The Mondrian Foundation's choice was risky but appropriate. It paid off. And afterwards, too, in his role as director of Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam, Melle Daamen was right on target. Here, too, obstinacy and many new initiatives, such as Expanding Theatre ('the theatre as a cultural hangout').¹

How naked is the emperor?

So why did I bring much less sympathy to his writings in newspapers? Did I have to look for it in myself? Melle likes to be the little boy who shouts as loudly as possible that the emperor is naked. If you stand and applaud the monarch yourself, it feels annoying. Case in point: I too would like to defend the legitimacy of art policy with positions in the economy, welfare, education et cetera. And Daamen gladly charges against this, in his view, unproven doctrine.

But recalcitrance can also become a gimmick, especially when it manifests itself in reasoning that is short-sighted, sloppily thought out and/or inconsistent.

In his booklet Grazing Over Artificial Grass² - subtitle: 'the failure of Dutch art policy' - Melle Daamen collected the above-mentioned writings, interviews conducted with him, correspondences and columns. He added some topical text. There are clear common threads in this collection. I extract a few here.

• He opposes the pyramid model that presupposes a broad underlay to get a high top in the arts. Instead, he wants to go only for the best of the best, from highly profiled and rigorous choices. ("...because government artificially propping up all cultural institutions is not sustainable in the long run.").
• But he also wants to face the 'high arts' and ''high culture' much more space for youth culture, night culture, non-canonical culture, 'non-white' culture.
• Daamen opposes the spread idea and excessive focus on the region.
• In contrast, he would like to see more subsidies shift from supply to demand.
• He rails against the constant call for innovation. Why keep opening 'vans of young artists', why not put more emphasis on delay, craftsmanship, depth?

Sometimes I can follow him very well. Policy is never without fashions, and it seems only fine to denounce them. The overconcentration on young talent, for example, disregards the importance and needs of older artists, in their 40s, middle-aged or towards the end of their careers.

Sometimes, however, what Melle presents to us is sloppily thought out or sloppily written down. A small example. As an illustration that the performing arts could be politically engaged even in the distant past, he mentions the Belgian independence revolt in 1830. This broke out during the performance of the opera La Muette de Portici in Brussels. However, the opera was programmed to celebrate King William I's birthday. That riots broke out was not what the theatre management had intended.

Another example: artificial grass grazier Melle finds it striking that nowadays entrepreneurs (Joop van den Ende, André Rieu, Wim Pijbes) are the patriotic cultural heroes where in the past artists were (Lily Bouwmeester, Breitner, Leonard Cohen). Nowadays, kiwis and pomegranates are the popular fruits, where in the past we mostly liked the vegetables cauliflower and endive.

There are outlets and cross roads

Melle opens sharply ("the art sector is hit by a severe crisis". "There is a dramatic drop in audience") only to announce a little later, "the picture is diffuse" and "never before has art been so in the spotlight". It's all true and so it just goes to show that you can't make so many firm claims about the arts as a whole. What is true for one part does not apply to another. And the dividing line is not simply subsidised/unsubsidised.

There is also something conservative in declaring the crisis, because who says there are no ways out? Indeed, those outlets will be found - as we saw during the corona crisis - but Melle ignores them. In Trouw ³Peter van der Lint described the various innovative approaches of concert halls, including the Concertgebouw and Tivoli Vredenburg, to engage young audiences with classical music. Starting the concert later, lots of explaining, informal atmosphere, drinks after. It works! And it is exactly what Melle Daamen is asking for.

Disdainfully, Melle sees a new 'court culture' emerging.

Now, it is easy to focus on the intrinsic, autonomous value of art and dismiss legitimisation based on external values or the assumption of external commissioning. However, someone defending arts policy funding always faces a dilemma. The money has to be made available by the government and sanctioned by politicians. And politicians, in the majority, are not strongly committed to the arts; subsidies must be dragged away from the gates of thrifty treasurers or roaring populists.

Intrinsic value at taxpayers' expense usually does not get you as far as you would like. And while not all external functions of the arts may be one hundred per cent proven, that does not necessarily make them untrue. Sure, there are slick fashion trends in policy and that includes 'social engagement' or 'social value', but in practice, that value is proven. Think of Adelheid Roosen's safaris that fit well into the Daamen alley of expanded theatre (theatre comes to society).

The writer himself believes that public should be a more important legitimising ground for subsidy. Fine, with that we are talking about social value and, as he points out "l'art pour l'homme". But frankly, I lost track here, and that may be just me. He juggles Renaissance and court culture (commissioning, control from above) versus Enlightenment and Romanticism ('l'art pour l'art'). He doesn't want court culture nor all that cultural entrepreneurship, but he also doesn't think it's OK to see art solely from intrinsic value. And pure public art he presumably doesn't want either.

Ultimately, in the diverse range of the arts, you come across the full spectrum, from autonomous art that only from themselves and for itself to highly applied, demand-oriented art. It would help to keep seeing those many individual facets of the diamond as well as their coherence. And then hang your reasoning on that.

On another policy trend (again with the risk of political correctness and subsidy-driven policy papers), namely diversity and inclusion, Melle Daamen rightly writes that it does not work to want to involve non-white young people in 'the' culture. You have to give them the chance to put down their culture themselves. Someone like Alida Dors is a pioneer in this⁴. Interestingly, Melle takes up the term 'pillarisation' in a new guise in this context and is positive about it. Emancipation in the last century came about within the pillars, only followed by integration. Would the same happen here, and will we maintain a divide for a long time to come? This is something to chew on, though.

The pope and governance

Melle Daamen is an experienced driver. He has also seriously engaged with governance meddled in the cultural sector. He has good ideas about that and solid observations, such as his stance against art paupers. But again, he is not very current (professionalisation has really taken off by now) and - obviously - not very nuanced. His polemic with 'art pope' Frans de Ruiter is witty reading (the flustered, heavily formulaic De Ruiter versus a light-hearted, informal and forgiving Daamen), but it is from the old box.

The e-mail exchange with Maarten Doorman on the intrinsic meaning of art makes more sense in that respect. And of course he is right that directors should not stay in their posts for too long, but to immediately turn this into something legal again in terms of prohibitions and commandments? I don't know. I saw directors whose shelf life had clearly expired. And sometimes I saw people staying in the same post for years, but constantly renewing themselves and their organisation. Sometimes well-functioning directors left within five years to avoid sticking to their seats in particular, and then that was too soon, missing continuity in the organisation. This requires careful management and supervision, customisation, judgement, performance reviews.

A young version of Melle Daamen who likes to reveal the emperor without clothes could just make fun of the current focus on job carousels and term contracts. By the way, he himself says: "I look back on the system of cultural governance, to which I myself have made such a contribution, with mixed feelings. It has (...) become far too much of a system (...) and is part of the technocratisation of cultural policy."

The artificial turf is there. There are plenty of top positions on this pitch where Melle Daamen would be the best player and playmaker. There he can score goals and then it doesn't matter if the occasional ball goes high over or far wide. In the newspaper, it is different. Here, he runs the risk of being seen not in the buff, but in his shirt. He might not mind that at all, though. After all, he does dare. Otherwise you wouldn't so easily write, for instance, that the Netherlands could do without national opera and ballet. ("Wouldn't the ballet tradition (...) be better anchored in, say, Paris or St Petersburg?") I disagree, but it shows free thinking and guts. Nevertheless, I like him better on the pitch than in the paper.