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Video: why women don't play a role in art history, and how to (not) fix it

A sitcom they already have. Women. Girls is a resounding success, so who better than slightly snobby Girls star Jemima Kirke to explain why women have been kept out of art? Indeed. No one, they thought at the rather innovative Tate, and so they had her explain in a cheerful but also aptly-named way where things went wrong between the art world... 

Research shows: music taste is a matter of appointment and habituation

That we have a scale the way we do, and that we perceive certain chords as beautiful, is because we have learned it. And what we have learned is the result of agreements. In music, as in fine art or theatre, there is no absolute ideal to which artists should aspire. No absolute beauty, no divine spark, no heaven to which we all long to return, just a set of agreements.

43rd Rotterdam Film Festival celebrates 25 years of Hubert Bals Fund with opening film Qissa

9,000 euros was the amount with which Indian director Anup Singh's Qissa got off the ground a decade ago. That money came from the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) affiliated Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), which has been supporting filmmakers in developing countries for 25 years now. Last night, Qissa opened the 43rd edition of the Rotterdam festival. This makes the port city the world capital for independent film for ten days, as business director Janneke Starink said at the ...

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Ballet gala Dancers' Fund '79 photo Antoinette Mooy

6 Tips for a successful gala. (Ballet gala of the Dancers' Fund '79)

A gala should be festive. So the Ballet Gala of the Dancers' Fund '79 Foundation was festive. On Monday 20 January 2014, the fund's 17th gala took place at the DeLaMar theatre in Amsterdam, Joop van den Ende's glamorous ballroom.

A few tips for a successful gala.

1: Know who is giving you an award
The fund set up by Han Ebbelaar and Alexandra Radius thirty-five years ago is doing a huge service to the dance world. Almost every Dutch talent can be on...

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Video: 3 times swearing and ranting for the good cause and Heleen Mees

Because Writers Unlimited collaborates with one of the last literary magazines in the Netherlands, and because that magazine is called 'Tirade', the last festival in The Hague included a place for tirades. And what might those be? The online dictionary says: 

[Tweet "Tirade: Long uninterrupted monologue, recruiting, pedantic and sometimes abusive (filippica)"]

Come they:
Jan van der Wal against his stalker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eTd1DK3KlM
About Heleen Mees by ...

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To hear Andrès Neuman speak is to want to buy his book #WU14

During Writers Unlimited, writers often mingle clandestinely among the common folk. And especially the younger, international authors, unlike the Adriaan van Dissen of this world who cannot take a step without being buried in a scrum of literary groupies. So it can happen that you find yourself drinking beer several times with someone who suddenly, completely unexpectedly, turns out to be a genius author. Like Andrès Neuman.

Neuman - small in stature, diabolically g...

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Show with substance is like good sex with a storyteller

 "A good book is a man seducing me is like sex with a stranger." Anne Provoost, the securely Flemish-talking essayist managed to shake up P.F. Thomése and Hermamn Koch for a moment. In a debate during Writers Unlimited, she made a plea for the not-true story, and did so in a metaphor that rather stirred the imagination. She quoted her own work "Fiction and Power" in which reading indeed becomes a rather physical affair:

"Your lich...

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Antjie Krog and Andries Samuel drive a tractor over your heart #WU14

"Of course she can write!" seems the mother of the award-winning South African poet Antjie Krog ever having exclaimed. "Because I can do it too, right? There's nothing special about that."

Blood creeps, even for Krog. After a ten-year career as a successful architect - and secretly grinding on words - her own son debuted Andries Samuel with the crushing, heartbreaking collection of poetry Wanpraktyk (2011). 

Writers Unlimited brought mother and son together on stage. Late at night. For the first time ever. And Wende sang to them. And god almighty how beautiful that was. By the way, you have to take it from us, because on pain of caning, pitch & feathers and fines from here to Siberia, it turned out that it was forbidden to film Wende singing (but we did, and the film was online for a while, but has now been removed from the internet).

Through Facebook, writers return to origins #wu14

It's because of Facebook. Says Ton van de Langkruis, artistic director of writers' festival Writers Unlimited: "You can no longer be that anonymous figure bombarding the world with hermetic texts from a locked attic room. The market is no longer for it. Your main means of communication is facebook. There you have to be open to questions, you communicate with your readers. We are back in the village square where the first stories were once told."  

With 'Like me' being the fest...

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Arie Boomsma flings books of poetry at Writers Unlimited

The latenight closures of Winternachten at Writers Unlimited are always upbeat. That's because the poets have already loosened up and the audience has drunk a bit more. And this time it was also because of mega-audience favourite (on other occasions) Arie Boomsma. Out of wantonness, the cheerful ratings canon smashed poetry books of his programme's guests.

It wasn't really fun for everyone, but you are a poet and your sales figures fit a hundred thousand times those of ...

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Noreena Herz topples from pedestal at Writers Unlimited

"Don't listen to the experts, they are actually always wrong." The gist of 'Eyes wide open', Noreena Hertz's latest book, is clear. That she is an expert herself, and therefore her views should be distrusted, makes sense. That the conversation she had on the subject with former politician Femke Halsema became increasingly bizarre was not so logical. Downright shocking was the fall that the terror of all the world's bankers took at the end.

That people are bad at making decisions,...

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No happy sex, but bitter sex #WU14

Sometimes a Writers Unlimited programme can catch you off guard. Last year, the late-night talk show on literary sex was a hilarious highlight - pun intended - of the festival. This time, the programme dropped Let's talk about sex bar little to laugh at.

Forget the connotations with Salt N Pepa. Indonesian Linda Christanty writes not about 'happy sex, but about bitter sex as a means of power, as a form of coercion and violence.' That made us quiet for a moment. 

'Thanks to facebook I have time to spare': writers embrace the social network at Writers Unlimited

Fouad Laroui does not do internet. The Moroccan-born author and professor does not even have a mobile phone. "I realise that this makes me part of a small elite," he declared during a debate at Writers Unlimited, "but I don't see the point of it." His tablemates did not share his opinion, which is quite remarkable. Just a few years ago, most of the international writing elite regarded social media as something with which they did not need to interfere.

'The outcast Moroccan and the Fleming may fight it out again' #WU14

In the rich tradition of writers who can drink each other's blood and foaming at the mouth with their pen, Writers Unlimited orchestrated a 'polemic'. In this debate, Abdelkader Benali expressed the voice of the people, and Saskia De Coster that of the elite. Both hacked at each other with help from moderator Elsbeth Etty. Result: a lot of incoherent banter.

For the occasion, in keeping with the title of his latest novel, Benali matched himself with a Bad Boy image, by ...

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2 nights of sex, booze and relaxed writers: a mini guide

Writers Unlimited is the most fun literary festival in the world. We can know, because we have been there twice now. Whether the comparison with all those 20 million other literature festivals in the world is entirely pure, we don't know. We do know that a lot of the writers who attend Writers Unlimited agree with us. At least during those few days and especially nights in January.

A few reasons.
1: Sex
On Writers Unlimited, at least one programme is always about...

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Expected unemployment due to arts cuts still at least 3,000

The UWV stated last Thursday that it has no idea how many people have actually been made unemployed by the culture cuts. From a rather ramshackle-looking research by NRC Handelsblad, which looked exclusively at jobs lost in Amsterdam and only at state-subsidised institutions, found that that category alone had generated 600 clients for the UWV. The rest are beyond the scope of the Amsterdam office.

Artists' acquittal: March of Civilisation was civilised after all

Police cracked down too hard at the March of Civilisation on 27 June 2011 in The Hague. The demonstration against art cuts, which was controversial because of its rather elitist naming, ended with a few charges by the ME on artists. Their friendly sit-in thereby degenerated into something that opponents of all those elitist subsidy slimmers (according to Martin Bosma of the PVV) were only too happy to see: violence.

The fa...

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Photo credits: Culture Marketing

Paper is still alive: cultural sector making its own magazines more often

Having their own magazine - glossy or otherwise - is the ideal way for more and more art institutions to engage customers. Although relatively expensive to make, art institutions use such a magazine for background and depth. Exactly what they often lack with traditional, paper-based media.

This is one of the remarkable results of a survey by the website culturemarketing.co.uk. It called on cultural organisations in October 2013 to take part in a survey ove...

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Cinema attendance growth stagnates, Verliefd op Ibiza Dutch frontrunner

Christmas saved the 2013 cinema year. While it seemed to be nothing at the beginning of December in terms of cinema attendance, the last three weeks of the year made up for a lot - courtesy of Hobbit 2.

2013 closed with 30.8 million visitors, Wilco Wolfers, president of the Dutch Cinematography Federation announced at the cinema industry's New Year meeting. Best-attended film was the US animated film Despicable Me 2, followed by The Hobbit 2 and the Dutch copl...

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The battleground of the arts: 41 institutions gone, 132 through without grants

The first assessment of the cold clean-up by Rutte 1 is here. Bussemaker sent it to the 1st chamber. In the Netherlands, 41 arts institutions have been closed down, while 132 other clubs are bravely holding on without subsidies (and therefore without staff). How long these firms will continue to run on volunteers is still unknown. Next year, we will surely be able to add a few to the list of the deceased.

There are still 224 companies left in the subsidised arts. For Zijlstra's axe were da...

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La Grande Bellezza and Borgman best films 2013 according to Dutch film press

Members of the Dutch Circle of Film Journalists (KNF) and other film critics have named the Italian tragicomedy La Grande Bellezza as the best cinema film of 2013. According to the same critics, Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman is the best Dutch film of this year, the KNF announced.

Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza received the most points after a record 91 Dutch critics cast a vote. The film, about a 60-year-old journalist looking for...

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European budget for culture increased

It's party time in Europe. And a bit here. Europe is increasing spending on culture. By less than first intended, but still. Cheers for the new year. A word of warning, though: you need three staff to manage an application.
We'll just give the whole press release.
Over the past two weeks, the European Commission has published the first calls of the Creative Europe Programme (2014-2020): four for the Culture sub-programme and 13 for the ...

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