6 proposals for cultural innovation

This is a pre-publication from the book The Art of Different, available from 17 January 2023 via author's site

The arts sector is vulnerable, as was undeniably shown during the pandemic years. It is also clear that these are not just temporary setbacks, but problems of a structural nature. These were already in play before Corona but were pushed forward or not structurally addressed. Back in 2018, the Social and Cultural Planning Office found that the cultural sector is 'apparently healthy'. ⁱThe cultural ecosystem is no longer functioning adequately. Its foundations have been eroded since the severe budget cuts from 2011 onwards. Increasingly loud calls for structural change rather than restoration of the old system are also heard in the arts sector itself.

This is the time to scrutinise systemic bottlenecks. The biggest and most pressing issues are as follows.

The basis of the cultural system is under threat: broad cultural education, essential to reach new audiences, has been cut.

And artists and creators, purveyors of content to museums and venues, are often the least paid and lead precarious lives. Productivity, quantity and growth were leading to Corona. The result was the far-reaching 'flexibilisation' of labour, as a result of which two-thirds of cultural workers are freelancers. This makes the system vulnerable and often results in underpayment.

As the main financier, the government can impose more and more requirements on subsidisers, resulting in bureaucratisation where control and accountability increasingly dominate. Money is central to policy rather than content, art itself.
Institutions are central to cultural policy, resulting in over-institutionalisation and oversupply. The way the government grants subsidies drives mutual competition between arts organisations. The result is skewing between large and small organisations, between Randstad and regions.

And innovation-so essential to the arts-is increasingly taking place outside mainstream art institutions, in incubators, artist collectives and online. However, cultural policy continues to focus on the classical art institutions.

The market as a model

Surveying the problems outlined, the question arises: how did it get to this point? This has been a decades-long process that has gained momentum over the last decade. Since the early 1990s, a series of successive cabinets have pursued a cultural policy primarily focused on cultural entrepreneurship, with the aim of making the sector less dependent on subsidies and more 'self-sufficient'.

The idea was to introduce, hand in hand with austerity measures, a different funding model for arts and culture, one in which the company would exemplify the arts sector as an efficient form of organisation.

Entrepreneurial they certainly became, the museums and venues, orchestras and companies, after the severe government cutbacks that were often also emulated by municipalities. Since 2005, own revenues rose on average from a third to over half of the total budget. That quantitative standards were met comes at a price: higher productivity means higher costs. And those costs have been passed on to underpaid staff with little to no job security. Jan Zoet, former president of lobby organisation Kunsten '92, says: 'You really shouldn't want so much flexible work, with all the uncertainty and loss of expertise, anymore.'

Bureaucracy and control

Most mainstream art institutions are at least half subsidised by public funds. Governments do so with public money and therefore place requirements on that support based on selection criteria. That is too understandable and logical, but problems arise when accountability and bureaucratic control take over. That process also takes place within the sector itself.

Business leaders and managers have been recruited to cope with the huge administration pressure. The same problem exists in other non-profit sectors with predominantly public money: healthcare and education.

In recent years, a guideline for so-called fair pay has been formulated especially for artists, but it is only linked to subsidies and is hardly monitored. Co-chair Bartelse of Kunsten 92 sighs: 'We have been talking about fair practice and fair pay for years now. It could be done faster. Every art discipline should have guidelines for fees of flex workers. And a financial safety net for calamities, like now.'

Moreover, fair pay is no more than a - partial - correction of a system that has grown lopsided, but not a fundamental transformation of the pay system: an artist will still earn many times less than a manager or director. Because while artists are balancing on - or below - the subsistence level, the cultural sector also has an upper layer of high earners. These salary scales are a side effect of 'cultural entrepreneurship': some directors now call themselves ceo and their remuneration is determined by an over-represented group on supervisory boards of arts organisations: men from the business, financial and legal sectors who are themselves big earners. Former director Zwart of Concordia in Enschede called the top salaries in the sector "scandalous and wry in the face of all those self-employed and creators" in Culture Press. Then people say: these are 'market-compliant salaries'. If you want that, go work in the business world. Especially boards of arts organisations should be primarily content-driven.'

In classical music, conductors and 'top' soloists earn top salaries, significantly above the Balkenende norm (216,000 euros gross in 2022) which is mostly paid from subsidy money. News site Culture Press charted the salaries of arts managers in 2020 that are (far) above the norm and wondered during the pandemic:

'Are managements themselves making the gesture, in solidarity with all unemployed or underemployed staff and artists, to take a pay cut? Remarkably, the own initiative is not yet present in the cultural sector. We demand it from others, from ceos of companies, but not from 'ourselves'. ii

The question is: why does the cultural sector find it acceptable to underpay qualified people who are indispensable? This confirms the prejudice in some parts of society that art is more of a hobby than a profession requiring professional training and skills.

During the pandemic, this inequality increased further. The Arts Union calculated that 88% of corona aid went to cultural institutions, and only 12% to creators and freelancers, who do the lion's share of the work in the sector. The union showed that zzp-ers had suffered around €1.6 billion in damages until the summer of 2022, and announced in the autumn of that year, to go to court to claim compensation for them as the State rejected liability.ⁱⁱⁱ Remarkably, these small self-employed are considered entrepreneurs by the tax authorities but were not allowed to claim entrepreneurial support.

Art in the political arena

At the same time, political-social issues permeate the art world and make visible that these issues are also at play within the sector. For instance, more than half of all cultural workers are women, but despite this, women are still underrepresented in managerial positions. Women artists' work is much less visible and they have less access to funding sources, although they are catching up. And transgressive behaviour appears to be strikingly common in precisely the cu;tural sector.

Which sees itself as a sanctuary where loose manners are the rule. This leads to a climate where abuse and undesirable behaviour have long been dismissed. Only recently, under the influence of the #MeToo-movement is tilting. In the Netherlands, too, the movement started in the US film world has led to many reports of victims; including within the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Rijksakademie and theatre group Oostpool.

The often hierarchical organisational structure that increasingly prevails in arts organisations too contributes to this. It is disappointing that the arts too are not always able to offer sufficient security to female and young staff in particular. Interns and starters on the job market are particularly vulnerable because of their dependence on the goodwill of a director, director, conductor or TV producer. And the many freelancers have no official position and can be manipulated to get or keep assignments.

Partly thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, there is more attention to institutional racism, of which the government itself is also guilty in, among others, the so-called Allowances affair. In the art world, this emancipation movement arouses solidarity, but at the same time reveals a problem within arts organisations themselves: staff, like visitors, are predominantly higher educated and white. Widening and new recruitment among both groups is necessary to keep the art world vital and current. The Diversity & Inclusion Code set by the government as a condition for subsidies is now bringing about some change in this. This is badly needed: the demographic shift in population composition is already a fact in the Randstad. More than half the children there have at least one parent with a migration background. Cultural policy is thus lagging far behind social reality. Regular art institutions-theatres, museums, concert halls-are struggling to get these groups in. More diverse programming does help, but does not yet draw full theatres and costs extra budget.

In addition, the cultural sector has a huge ecological footprint due to a lot of travelling. A succession of openings, festivals, fairs and premieres and the endless stream of short projects make the art sector one of the most polluting. Director Wolfs of the Stedelijk Museum says he wants "more limited travel: a curator does not have to accompany a loan abroad and can watch and consult online on how it is set up". The same applies to restorations. 'The non-stop travelling circus-I hope that changes.' In the UK, the duty to preserve and financial support to do so has already led to significant results among cultural organisations.^iv

The discussion on the provenance of artefacts began with the -often late- restitution of Jewish art property and in recent years has extended to art from countries that were formerly Western colonies. It is then referred to as colonial art. If there has been appropriation of heritage during colonial wars, then it is looted art. In the Netherlands, the Council for Culture in 2020 advised researching colonial provenance and pursuing an active restitution policy-even if countries do not ask for it themselves. Ethics - and not law - is leading and partly because of this, this debate has become highly polarised. The Van Abbemuseum has joined the international initiative 'Decolonising the museum'. The director explains: 'The museum was largely paid for in the 1930s with profits from the colonies: Van Abbe was a cigar manufacturer who made his fortune with highly exploitative work done by so-called 'contract workers' in Sumatra.' Opponents speak of cancel culture and accuse supporters of censorship. The origins of current donations and sponsorship funds are also increasingly in question-this is discussed in detail in Part II of this book.

Systemic change

Cultural entrepreneurship has gone too far and become an end rather than a means. It has become so heavily rigged with regulations and subsidy requirements that control and bureaucracy dominate. Then such a system becomes rigid and innovation has little chance. People then start adapting more and more to the rigid and confusing system-they feel it is immutable. As a result, no one feels responsible anymore for its negative consequences, but blames them on 'the system' or 'the policy'.

First of all, the sector itself will have to take responsibility for a fairer and healthier system and set a good example. When problems arise, the stubborn reflex is: the government should sort that out, there should be more subsidies for that first. But continuing to pump more money into a stalled system makes no sense.

Transitions take so long because the old course is continued for too long. The problems are recognised, but all effort then goes into trying to fix the system rather than change it.

The key question now is: will the cultural sector solve its systemic problems, or do we flee back into a stalled system ?

The art world in particular, with all its creative capacity, should be able to inventively make necessary changes.

The final section of this book puts forward a number of proposals to this end, hoping to thereby spark a discussion on a necessary transition.

Good to know

Remuneration of artists and freelance cultural workers

While the number of jobs in the entire Dutch economy grew by 2.1% from 2010 to 2016, the volume of labour in the cultural and creative sector decreased by 11.5%. The number of cultural self-employed in the sector increased from 92,820 in 2010 to 141,150 in 2018: 50% more in eight years. Most have a 'hybrid professional practice', i.e. they have multiple temporary or freelance employers. This includes performers such as actors, and cultural workers such as art critics, authors and researchers.^v This is partly because these 'self-employed persons without staff or self-employed persons should actually be paid 40% more than their colleagues in permanent employment, because they have to finance their social security completely by themselves.

The average visual artist earns gross €13,000 a year. That is a tight welfare level. 'Only a small proportion of artists can survive purely by selling work through the gallery or their own channels,' says co-director Eckenhaussen of interest group Platform BK. The severe cuts to culture also killed off the Work and Income for Artists Act in 2012.

It offered artists the possibility of receiving a supplement to their income for up to four years within a ten-year period if they could not provide a basic income with their artistic work. All in all, the repeal of the WWIK resulted in a paltry 8 million in savings for the state. but that falling supplement means the difference for many artists in just getting above the line or not.^vi Supplementing with a teaching position at an art academy yields less and less: there, too, there are zero contracts and so-called revolving-door constructions, which are actually illegal.

Partly due to mergers of orchestras, musicians were forced to accept zero contracts, where they are brought in on an on-call basis. So-called substitutes not infrequently earn as little as 100 euros for an entire concert and are far from always paid for rehearsals immediately with the orchestra - let alone for rehearsing a piece of music at home.

A similarly rigorous reorganisation took place in the theatre world. Only Internationaal Theater Amsterdam and Nationale Theater/Toneel still employ actors on a permanent basis; that's a total of no more than between 30 and 40 people nationwide, with hundreds of colleagues who are freelancers and often end up on welfare in the summers because there are hardly any performances then.

All other companies, including in dance, work on a project or seasonal basis with trained and often very experienced theatre people. This also applies mostly to technicians, directors and choreographers. Most unpaid positions are at pop venues: there, only 19% of staff are salaried, more than half are volunteers and have to make do with a free concert. Authors and writers typically get 10% from the proceeds of their books and not infrequently work on a publication for long periods at their own expense. There is no longer a budget for independent, out-of-university research with endowment funds.

During Corona, Employer Support (NOW) was only available for those in permanent employment. The Temporary Transitional Self-Employment Scheme. 40% of TOZO applicants in Amsterdam work as freelancers in the art sector. But on welfare level, you can already barely pay your rent in the expensive capital. Moreover, those who lived together could not apply.^vii

Although self-employed people are entrepreneurs, they could not apply for business support.

Back in June 2020, the Platform for freelance musicians reported that a silent disaster was underway among self-employed musicians: over 60 per cent of those surveyed reported that assignments for the rest of the season had been cancelled, almost 40 per cent were already facing cancellations for the following year due to rescheduled programmes. More than a quarter were therefore considering retraining even then.^viii . Consequence: More than two-thirds of self-employed people experienced a drop in turnover of more than half of their previous income, CBS reported in 2021.

Ten times as much corona aid went to the big organisations, but then they gave less aid to temporary workers, artists and freelancers than small organisations. The Kunstenbond conducted and is conducting court cases on bogus self-employment on behalf of permanent temporary workers of, among others, The Ballet Orchestra: it had to employ these singers as yet. The irony is that some had since retrained and moved on to jobs offering more security of existence. The union also lobbied with other interest groups for a one-off compensation of 5,000 euros for all self-employed singers, but this proposal did not make it through politics.^ix

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https://www.msn.com/nl-nl/entertainment/nieuws/stille-ramp-gaande-voor-zzpers-in-de-cultuursector/ar-BB15WVxf

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