The art of just a little bit different - comment on essay Renée Steenbergen

Renée Steenbergen has made a name for herself through her expertise of private cultural finance and art collections1 . Recently, she received a lot of space in the NRC and attention from Cultural Press for her latest publication The Art of Different. It made me curious.

In her booklet, she makes some good proposals and offers useful suggestions for a healthier arts business. For example: that both governments and private funders should be more strongly committed to individual creators instead of exclusively promoting (larger) institutions. And: that too much focus is on projects, too little on long-term strategy. Steenbergen also suggests a form of exit policy, or a softer landing for institutions that lose their multi-year grants in favour of newcomers. That policy prevents capital destruction and helps the transfer of knowledge, experience and people.

Lowlands

Two things I set myself when I started this review. The first was to provide relief: I had to ensure a certain balance between positive comments (just to be sure, I started doing that immediately above) and critical remarks. This intention has flowed all my life from the unintended lesson of my senior lecturer when I presented her with the draft for my thesis. For an hour, she slapped me around with all the shortcomings, gaps, misses and incomplete sources. After which I not only left the building stricken, but also in a fog. Had my thesis failed and had she demonstrated this with a good number of examples? Or would it be an acceptable final product and she had only named what I still needed to work on? A commentary needs relief, I learnt, to make sense of it.

And that is exactly what you miss in The Art of Different. The first 100 pages of the booklet offer a list of everything that is wrong. No corner is skipped: the bureaucracy, the power of the big institutions, gender inequality, lack of cultural diversity, unfair pay, oversupply, imperfect demand, deficient patronage, problems with wrong money from sponsors, etc. In short: all known pain points. For those who remain motivated to roll up their sleeves in this vale of tears, a mere 14 pages of suggestions for improvements follow.

This is how it works

My second intention was to explore the irritations that came to mind on reading. After all, being annoyed often says as much about yourself as it does about the object of irritation. Was I, for instance, jealous of the attention and debate this publication garnered? I myself published an essay in Boekman Special last year on the "Tompouce economy"2. It is fair to say that I had put quite an effort into composing it carefully and documented. And before publication, the Boekman Foundation and I had submitted it to experts for critical reading and comment. I had hoped that my contribution would take the cultural economic debate a little further. The essay is mainly about the significance of culture for a greener economy. And conversely for help from economists who might help make the complicated market of culture healthier. To my disappointment, the essay has so far received little active attention. But I know how it goes: whether something catches on is usually an unpredictable effect of many factors such as: quality, timing, coincidence, public relations, current trends, competing items... So, no, I do not suspect in myself any 'jalousie de métier'. And look, with this piece I am also already contributing to a wider reception of "The Art of Different".

Co-swimming

In the essay "The Tompouce Economy", I quote writer Dirk Ayelt Kooiman, who in the 1980s wrote on his own his alternative culture note, "Everything Must Be Different". I could appreciate his initiative. A writer who, in all his bravery and naivety and in the silence of his study, outside the world of art policy bigwigs, wanted to write down how things should be done.

With the "Art of Other", I did not feel the benevolence. Steenbergen is not that naive writer who is somewhat out of touch with the world. You then interpret it as pretentious rather than naive when she shouts as a lone warrior: it can be done differently and I know how. We have Kunsten 92 with its manifesto '2030'3, there is the Council for Culture that considers the system, there are the employers' organisations and the trade unions, there is the Ministry of OCW, there are sector institutes, conferences, think tanks, etc. Why, if you do have the intelligence and expertise, why not swim with that current and while swimming indicate lines that you see can be shifted?

Generously known

One could say that Steenbergen did seek the connection with the sector through the many interviews she apparently conducted, but in which we are not given an insight. It seems she quotes from them more for the purpose of adducing her positions, rather than building on the experiences and insights of the interviewees. This leads to many of her error analyses - in themselves mostly correct - being generously familiar material. We are familiar with that. The problem lies precisely in the toughness of those problems, sometimes perhaps even in the (near) impossibility of change.

Of course, the injustice of the lack of 'fair pay', for instance, cannot be highlighted often enough. But if you really want to fight it, you will have to relate to some extent to everything that has moved into this in recent years. Starting with the analysis of the labour market by the SER and the Council for Culture and their opinion "Passion Valued".4 The cultural and creative sectors have drawn up a labour market agenda, embraced by the minister5. There is a labour market platform, Platform ACCT6. The corona crisis has created a Cultural and Creative Sector Task Force. There are 'chain tables' to achieve better rates and collective agreements. So it seems constructive to go with that moving stream. Nobody has all the wisdom. Any wise suggestion is again taken. After all, we are moving too slowly. Especially the economics of cultural enterprise are a super tough issue.

"Artists, unite!"?

When someone with dry eyes calls on Dutch artists to finally unite, tears shoot into my then still dry eyes. Of bewilderment, and a little bit of laughter. The freelance musicians united only a few years ago in their combative platform7. More than 40 organisations of freelance artists united in 2020 in the Creative Coalition8, supported the by the Arts Federation. The Creative Industries Federation sought cooperation with Kunsten 92 for its lobbying. And so on. If you really want to contribute, you have to be seven steps further by now and find out how effective all this collaboration is now, where the stumbling blocks and obstacles are, how to remove them, what incentives to provide.

Food for thought

Renée Steenbergen also puts things on the table that you could have a good debate about. For example, about the "overreaching" formations for management, marketing, fundraising. You could indeed ask whether the relationship with actual art production is not skewed. However, you can also take up the (non-romantic) proposition that the art business is emancipated and professionalised and that strengthening the aforementioned functions - if all goes well - benefits supply and take-up.

One can, as Steenbergen does, question the unassailable position of the big art institutions. Especially if it comes at the expense of smaller players and independent artists. But in reality - and potentially all the more so - those big players often matter because they offer opportunities to smaller fellow institutions and to self-employed artists. Think of the National Ballet collaborating with ISH and other dance initiatives and commissioning choreographers. Think of the National Opera with Opera Forward. Or the recent performance there "Operettaland" by versatile artist Steef de Jong. Of course, the larger institutions can be called upon to play this role even more. Incidentally, they are also signposts for cultural Netherlands.

Municipalities, free producers

The desire of municipalities to erect large cultural buildings - Steenbergen rightly points this out - is not a recent phenomenon. It has been going on for decades. The problem is not that they want to erect those buildings. They can create regional pride and connection and also be the local cultural showcase. The problem is that the operating costs come at the expense of everything else. This in turn requires the business acumen to find smarter forms of exploitation rather than perpetuating situations: theatre makers having to complain permanently about the leaking roof, non-functioning showers, too cramped spaces in dilapidated art buildings.

Also not new, but always good to highlight -as Steenbergen does- is the significance of the non-subsidised sector. Arts policy is often confused with subsidy policy. But art policy should focus much more on how the government can help keep free producers, art lenders and galleries in the saddle.

The big transition?

Renée Steebergen writes that she wants to start a discussion about a necessary transition. It seems to me that there is already more or less permanent discussion, although it is far from fruitful. And a big transition? Grand approaches and structural changes often lead to disappointment, bureaucracy, delays, new system failures. Personally, I believe more in pilots, small but striking shifts, pilot areas, adopting best practice. Loosening screws and bolts and fixing them again, but slightly differently. "Everything must be Different" often leads to "nothing changes". The "Art of Different" I would like to translate into: 'The Art of Just Different'. As every musician knows, a small difference in rhythm or dynamics can have a big effect. Above all, look: where are the obstacles and the solutions? And implement those solutions in concrete terms, put pressure on them. So many parties have come up with tools for change in recent years. Just get to grips with it.

Footnotes