Cultural sector should not solve the failure of politics. Why it should never be about 'impact' again. 

"For attending culture, a high degree of urbanity also appears to have a positive impact on the likelihood of participation."

A sentence like that, that's what you read studies for. I found this one in the Boekman research into the extent to which people participate in culture and sport, and whether any trends can be identified. That this high degree of urbanity has a positive influence on participation in culture I could discover for myself on Thursday in Rijssen in the province of Overijssel, known among the heathens of my generation as the location of Belcampo's Het Grote Gebeuren. 

Rijssen has city rights, but does not possess "a high degree of urbanity". However, it does have the Park building, a villa founded early last century for the upliftment and entertainment of workers, where the lowered ceilings from the 1970s provided the interior architecture with a fittingly Reformed backdrop. The stage, which features strikingly secular programming, was the venue for the annual OKTO congress, making it quite unique in the Netherlands. 

Thijs Kemperink

Okto, that's the consultation of small theatres in Overijssel. There are dozens of them, often run by volunteers and the occasional professional. That conference provided a lot of inspiration. We owed that in no small part to Thijs Kemperink, who contributes considerably to the self-awareness of the eastern Netherlands with his disarming narrative style and cherished regional language. 

That he has never managed to attract a national daily to the east in the past 17 years is therefore mainly due to the fact that the roads from Amsterdam to the eastern Netherlands are mysteriously much longer than in the opposite direction. Something that mainly keeps cultural journalists within the A10 Ring Road.

Class society

Do we have that gap between Randstad and region to thank for that? Until Thursday 5 June we were allowed to think so, but then the Sociaal Cultureel Planbureau published an investigation which consigned that distinction to the realm of fantasy. There is less difference between Randstad and region than between socio-cultural classes. Money and education determine who you love and who you exclude much more than whether your house is on a cart track or highway. Activity centre The Point in Vroomshoop is run by volunteers, like the former financial director of Veolia.

If you compare the two studies side by side, you will see that culture in particular plays an important role. The four categories that Boekman distinguishes in participation in sports and culture can be defined fairly accurately within the seven socio-cultural categories of the SCP and then it turns out that income and education determine social success and cultural or sporting activity. Whether you live in Vroomshoop, Rijssen or Amsterdam. We live in a class society and not a country divided into regions.

And then talk about impact. 

Empty impact

In Rijssen, it was also about this. Geert Boogaard, founder of the ubiquitous consultancy and lobbying firm Blueyard, did the keynote and that speech was about the concept of 'impact'. According to Boogaard, this is a rather vacuous concept, and cultural organisations should not want to be too concerned with it. The man from Blueyard thinks the concepts of 'meaning' and 'impact' are more manageable. So be it. 

What particularly occupied my mind on the train back to Utrecht was the question of why do you actually have to demonstrate your impact if you enter into a subsidy relationship with a government? That as a cultural company you have to prove that you are doing your job is logical. But do you also have to prove that you have 'impact'? Aren't you then doing that politician's job?

A municipal government is elected to have an impact on the people. That is what we elect them for. They deploy subsidies for that purpose. And then that elected council and its governors should go and demonstrate the impact of all that governing. That is not for the governed to demonstrate. The governors go to the ballot box and assess the impact of your governance there. 

Senseless cultural policy?

And speaking of impact: the two reports released on Thursday 5 June together lead to only one possible conclusion. You can, with or without subsidies, make the culture and sports sector jump through a hundred thousand hoops to attract more and more diverse audiences, or work more inclusively, but it will all be to no avail as long as the socio-economic gap continues to get deeper and wider every day.

In fact, all this cultural policy directed down to the last millimetre is a big sham that blames artists for social unrest, while the problem is easily solved by politicians. There, for example, something about the mortgage interest deduction to do. 

The fact that this article was written from a home office in a social housing tenement need not change that.