If you want to do research out of curiosity, you should especially not apply to the government for money. Whether you are a scientist or an artist: in The Hague, they want you to know in advance what you are going to find and what it will yield. Anoek Nuyens, who caused a furore with her performance 'De Zaak Shell', could therefore not prepare her next performance about Tata Steel with government money: subsidy was only possible if she could also come up with a product with a predictable audience within a set deadline.
She can now, thanks to private backers, conduct research for three years without an immediate performance. This is a luxury that science too yearns for. Every reason, then, to treat science and art more as equals again, Marleen Stikker argued at the symposium Choosing Artists in Amsterdam's Trippenhuis.
Relaxed symposium
The arts sector yearns for freedom and peace. This much became clear. Rarely experienced such a relaxed symposium. Presumably it was because of the occasion: the retirement of Marianne Versteegh, founder and for 31 years the driving force behind Kunsten '92. Views of calm in a building that, since its latest renovation, looks even more like a crematorium than before. The Trippenhuis, in the middle of Amsterdam's Red Light District, offered an afternoon of space for reflection and resonance, and throughout the afternoon a sense of missing descended on the assembled cultural bobos.
That lack then did not so much concern Marianne Versteegh, who fortunately was still plentiful, but freedom. In recent decades, successive (neo)liberal cabinets have created an increasingly dense jungle of regulations, especially for people who want to use public money for beautiful things. Creativity, needed for much more than just the arts, does not thrive on the administrative pressure that subsidy now brings.
Lower state pension age?
Everyone - not just artists, as in Ireland - a basic income? The arts union was still shouting from the audience that this could be done simply by lowering the state pension age from 67 to 18, after which all allowances, benefits and discounts could be abolished, but at Kunsten '92 they know better than anyone that simple solutions in The Hague do not work.
That interest group is the personification of the polder model in the arts, where 130 interest groups still want to call the shots and thus rarely agree. However necessary the polder model will prove to keep Dutch feet dry in the coming decades, it is particularly syrupy. For instance, how do we ensure that the arts no longer get a new code every year? After all, it is not really enforced because the subsidy committees, which again consist of artists, have better things to do than check each other for decent behaviour. And of course, fair practice, governance, diversity and sustainability are all about decency. Something you just have to do, according to a prominent CDA member.
Exploitation
The current secretary of state, in her principles note, which is being debated in the House today, has expressed that the sector needs a rest for a while. Everyone in the Trippenhuis was happy about that. Remarkably, they were also kind of happy with the announcement that decent treatment of staff could also lead to less production compulsion. Because it is this unbridled production compulsion that has led orchestras, for instance, to shifting dwindling budgets so far onto the worst protected part of the staff: the temporary workers. For a long time, subsidy cuts were not allowed to lead to less art, and so they led to poorer pay for artists.
The title of the symposium was therefore well chosen: The Netherlands must choose artists. Because if you only choose art, you only focus on the result, with no eye for how it comes about.
That choice leads to exploitation of people.
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
