"Every confidence starts with dancing, playing and feeling together." It is the last thought on a presentation slide of Pascal Gielen, but he is still thumping solidly a day later. Gielen was one of dozens of speakers at the Congress Venues, Festivals and Events, which took place in and around TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht on Monday 15 September.
The Antwerp professor of cultural sociology closed with his plea for revaluation of the 'commons', the equal sharing of resources, dovetailed seamlessly with another presentation, the hour before, by Briton Mark Davyd. Davyd presented a British initiative to release funds for the UK's 'grassroots' music scene with a voluntary surcharge of £1 per concert ticket. A scene of small pop music venues, which increasingly suffer from gentrification (complaining neighbours) and increased costs for sound insulation, energy and taxes.
Revival of Coldplay
The initiative, which is now set to be replicated in Germany, received a big cheer from Coldplay. The global act embraced the Music Venue Trust when selling tickets for its latest tour, which brought in just under a million extra. Because this act expressed its confidence, more concert promoters soon came over the bridge, so that now 30 per cent of tickets also contribute to the circuit where every band once started: the small barn with the gasping audience in a provincial town where nothing happens at night.
If the voluntary initiative does not meet the government's stated targets of 100 per cent coverage in two years, the government turns it into a compulsory, statutory scheme, and in libertarian England everyone wants to avoid that. Because with a legal obligation comes the duty of far-reaching accountability, established protocols and rules and control. Then distrust creeps into the system and that is disastrous for the creative sector.
Competition is bad
Against that distrust, then, Pascal Gielen also agitates. In what is left of our welfare state, the government still has an important role in the cultural sector. There is always too little money for too many applicants, and that leads to competition and envy. Creatives are competing with each other instead of working together. It is, says Gielen, a mistaken, neoliberal idea that such competition is necessary for quality development. The opposite is true, he argues. Extreme control leads to more mistrust, which in turn leads to us shifting more and more responsibility, to ever larger and more distant institutions.
Trust gives way to schemes and insurance, and proximity to digital distance. While certainly pop music is about direct contact, not only in images, but also in corporeal presence and sensory experiences.
Necessarily vulnerable
As we hand over more and more, we also become more vulnerable and afraid to share that with others, says Gielen. Coming out for your vulnerability means you become prey to the competition.
Just as the Music Venue Trust has the word 'trust' in it for a reason, Gielen argues for a system that does not want to be a system. In an environment in which we share with each other what we need, without wanting to capture that reciprocity in forms and protocols, trust has to come back to number one.
He cites examples like Amsterdam's Splendor, a club with self-governance by its members, with a minimum of rules and a maximum of freedom, without judging each other. That things do occasionally go wrong and someone takes on too much is normal risk: people are basically never out to screw each other.
But who oversees it?
A low-regulation cultural sector, in which creativity gets all the space it needs, laws are stretched here and there and we can always call each other to account for everything, is quite a long way off. That became clear a session later, when it was about the disturbed relations between director-directors and supervisory boards. Verkadefabriek director Jeffrey Meulman, who raised that largely hushed-up problem a year ago, said in his introduction that he had been able to build good cooperation with his Supervisory Board for a while now. Precisely by making clear agreements but working less with protocols, mutual trust has been restored.
That things go wrong far more often precisely, and that too often director-directors are sacrificed to the risk-averse actions of regulators, the other panellists admitted only reluctantly. Titia Haaxma, as director of Cultuur+Ondernemen responsible for the (increasingly voluminous) Cultural Governance Code, announced afterwards that there would be a few additions, following this session. For instance, it should be stipulated that supervisors should never serve more than two terms, and also only hold a limited number of 'jobs' as supervisors.
Hopeless idealism?
That rules need to be added again because things apparently still go wrong too often seems to show that Pascal Gielen's plea for trust-based commons is hopeless idealism. That is too negative thinking, Jeffrey Meulman told us. At the Verkadefabriek, both atmosphere and turnover have improved considerably since he decimated the number of rules and meeting times, and works much more on the basis of trust.
