"The easiest gain is then to produce less. Because high production implies a lot of energy and material use, travel movements and other forms of impact."
Last week, the long-awaited Opinion of the Council for Culture out about sustainability, and quicker than I could click 'open', tempers flared. Came all because of the sentence above, which, mentioned in the first headlines, revived traumas of Halbe Zijlstra's reign of terror. Above all, I saw an art world that was beginning to look suspiciously like the fairly conservative society that art naturally also reflects.
Tata Steel
After all, it has to be said: sustainability, that's for someone else to do. Look at Tata Steel, look at the farmers with their overproduction of calves because of our dairy industry, look at Schiphol Airport and all those private jets. Why now suddenly target that art sector again on so-called overproduction?
It's a pavlov reaction. Seems a bit disappointing from a sector still often seen as progressive and ahead of the troops.
Although the Culture Council did expect the reaction, as the sequel shows: "Less quickly has a nasty aftertaste, but if used well it could also offer space: more with less. Provided the subsidy budgets for the cultural sector remain at least the same, the council sees opportunities for the cultural sector in producing less. If the performance pressure for each organisation is reduced slightly, there will be more room for quality, reflection and sustainability. In the opinion of the council, producing less for reasons of sustainability is therefore not an austerity measure in disguise: not fewer players in the cultural sector, but better-equipped players."
Circular production
No one with common sense should be against this. After all, it is also the argument we like to use when it comes to agriculture: no bio-industry, but small-scale, circular farms producing as organically and locally as possible. Not quantity, but quality. That was also the salvation of viticulture in the Languedoc-Roussillon, Provence and the Spanish plateau in the 1990s. The whole canal belt is still drinking the fruits of that today, if they don't have them coming from Latin America by now, at least.
Earlier, the Performing Arts Fund, for example, in a rare moment of self-awareness, recognised that the existing subsidy system led to overproduction and thus quality inflation. (Subsidy was measured by the number of performances, regardless of the number of productions you achieved that number with). So why not send slightly fewer trucks on the road now because you change venues less often?
You are really better off ensuring top quality in smaller quantities, because everyone benefits. Making a new production is less sustainable than using a product already made for longer, playing at one location for a week is more sustainable than playing somewhere else every day. It also makes for longer-term contracts and thus more financial security for everyone involved.
Take train times and stations into account, plus better bicycle parking facilities at your building? That's how you avoid car use by your audience.
Token behaviour
Problem is, of course, that this does not solve all the problems. Indeed: what the Council's advice makes clear is that the problem is huge, and that really everyone in the Netherlands, all departments, all governments and every citizen, will have to do something to be able to cope with the climate disaster that is befalling us. And because doing so on their own initiative usually leads to some 'token' behaviour like that theatre maker who no longer flies and therefore do not want to come from Paris to Amsterdam either, a little guidance from above is not such a disaster at all.
So the council is again right when it says: "Autonomy, however, the interviews show, is also used as an excuse not to take responsibility for sustainability, as a licence not to (have to) engage with sustainability. The council stresses that the content of a work of art is entirely up to the artist. Whether an artist wants to address sustainability issues, for instance, and in what form, is his or her own choice. But which materials and energy sources are used to do so, that is something one is supposed to think about anno 2023, the council said."
0.25 per cent
It is time to ask yourself what it would be like if you used your talent and creativity to adapt to changing circumstances, instead of demanding that those circumstances be made as optimal as possible for you by the grantmaker.
Does that solve the climate crisis? Not with the 0.25 per cent the sector contributes to CO2 emissions, but with the example set by the institutions in particular. Biodiesel in the generators or a solar park at the summer festival: it is a start. More art by daylight than by artificial light? A challenge, which they have already experienced at Oerol. In Utrecht's Blue Hall, the curtains can be opened, as in ITA's Rabozaal. Acoustic pop concerts in smaller venues? It would be a boon for many a tinnitus leader. Can that work with Death Metal too? I see possibilities. Sacrifice some realism for better diction and louder voices? In England, they have no problem with that. Develop buildings on acoustics rather than comfort? Exciting! On tour to Japan and Brazil? Maybe your sense of grandeur would also be served by a few less air travel.
Starting by yourself
The Council makes it clear that the problem is huge, and therefore cannot be solved so quickly. In doing so, it runs the risk of diluting the opinion into whataboutism, a debunking of the argument by pointing to all these other problems and problem owners. Then we get nowhere.
So just get started. I myself got rid of the petrol car in 2016 and have since been happily using train, bike, pony car and electric shared cars: more comfort and luxury in exchange for a little bit of polluting autonomy. I only fly when there really is no other way at all, and so will continue to have certain experiences only from Instagram.
Culture Press' server is in the Netherlands, cloud services use nearby servers as much as possible. I keep things up to date on an economical laptop, instead of a power-hungry PC. THE website may soon switch to 'dark mode', then it will cost you a few fewer watts to read it at home. It's all symbol behaviour, I know, but it makes me feel good.
And if I desire something from art, it is a good feeling.
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