"Jazzenzo no longer welcome at venues and festivals," claims online jazz magazine Jazzenzo. The reason is a letter the medium received from the BIM House on 24 April. In that letter, co-signed by an impressive number of prestigious venues and festivals such as TivoliVredenburg and North Sea Jazz, the BIM house announces that it will no longer grant free tickets to the unpaid reporters of...
Bernadette Stokvis is leaving after 11 years of service as business director of Maas theatre and dance. Her successor will be recruited soon. Stokvis has been business director at Maas since 2013. Before that, she was initiator, artistic coordinator and later business director of Korzo The Hague. Thanks in part to her leadership, Maas is a BIS company and also the largest theatre and dance company for youth in...
We need to talk about the Ravine year for a moment. After all, in 2026, the government is cutting billions from the municipal fund. Until now, this has been quite abstract because, let's face it: do we have any idea what money in your city goes where and from whom it comes? Municipal spending is a black box. My city now has in a row...
The Utrecht School of Music, also known as DUMS, has decided not to apply for a subsidy from the municipality. In a letter the school sent at the beginning of April to consultation partners in the Utrecht amateur arts field, the management states: "Our teachers indicated at its foundation that they did not want to be subsidised in order to guarantee independence from the municipality. However, Cultural Affairs gave...
According to the site wbtr.nl, "more than a thousand times a year within associations and foundations something goes wrong, with major consequences. Think of financial mess, inattention of supervisors or entanglement of interests'. In the cultural sector, we are familiar with the Governance Code for Culture, which hopes to prevent 'things going wrong' with a series of recommendations. If an 'issue' hits the media...
Amsterdam Museum collaborates with the Museum of the City of New York and original inhabitants of New York Four hundred years ago, the first Dutch settlers arrived in the area that is now New York. Their mission from the Dutch West India Company (WIC) was to establish the colony of New Netherland, with its capital New Amsterdam, at the southern tip of...
Museums are not only a treasure chamber in which new qualities and stories can be found all the time, but also a workshop in which museum professionals and the public gain new knowledge, insights and experiences together. Museum scientific research is of great importance in deepening knowledge about the collection and examining it from the questions that today's society...
Utrecht - Last Saturday 30 March, cultural free port De Nijverheid received the Harm Lambers Building Block for Special Art in Utrecht. This honourable challenge trophy was presented by Utrecht dance company De Dansers, which received this biennial award for the first time in 2022. Praise from the jury Josephine van Rheenen of De Dansers was laudatory in the jury report on...
Free art is in danger. At least that is what the Free Left Foundation claims. The article goes around persistently on facebook: "Unfree art is not really art at all." Actress Femke Lakerveld breaks a lance for the free arts in this interview with journalist Joep van Ruiten. The occasion is a manifestation in Groningen, which will feature a number of speakers on whether...
The doughnut - American delicacy of Dutch origin - is popular. Personally, I prefer the tompouce. The name sounds chicly French, yet it is a much-appreciated Dutch treat, mainly thanks to HEMA. British economist Kate Raworth took the doughnut as a metaphor her alternative to the current growth economy. She argues that economic science is a very...
Robbert Maruanaija and Patricia de Weichs de Wenne have joined the supervisory board of the Amsterdam Museum. Amsterdam City Council's Alderman for Art and Culture Touria Meliani appointed the new members. Robbert Maruanaija (1986, born and living in Amsterdam) started his working life as a professional footballer and then switched to the creative sector. He explains that...
How do we ensure that the museum sector remains financially healthy and future-proof? In what ways can we transform museums into sustainable and attractive workplaces? And in what ways do we encourage inclusiveness and diversity? These pressing questions are at the heart of the new learning programme Leadership in Culture (LinC) x Museum Association. Challenges LinC x Museum Association was created at the initiative of the Museum Association...
What happens behind the scenes at organisations when they face allegations of (serious) cross-border behaviour? Trainee Emilia accuses a theatre technician at a well-known theatre company of rape. This piece is based on her story and her own research, anonymised for privacy reasons. June 2022, beer, vodka, joints and a share scooter It's party time in a city park; students...
In the series In Perspective, Erik Akkermans looks back and ahead at developments in cultural policy and practice. Today: the 1985 Budapest Cultural Forum and a renewed cold war. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only a short time before, intense discussions between Warsaw Pact and NATO countries on security, disarmament and free cultural...
The Academy of Arts gets five new members: Alida Dors, Hella Jongerius, Erik van Lieshout, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Manon Uphoff. Members of the Academy of Arts are artists from across the arts. The new members will be installed on 28 March 2024. Members of the Academy of Arts have proven themselves in their profession and want to make a...
The old domain of VPRO, established in decades of Meticulous and Desperate Simplism, Tegenlicht and Zomer- dan Wintergasten, languished for quite a while. Viewer terror fragmented the safely elitist offerings. BNNVARA searched for a tone and didn't find it. Cultural omnivores like yours truly could no longer turn on the TV to 2 with impunity and then, after an evening of content, turn it against...
"The vote for Wilders may be a dissenting vote, but apparently explicit racism is not a dealbreaker for all those people. That's terrible for someone of colour." In the stately Trippenhuis, seat of the Academy of Arts, this high word from Karin Amatmoekrim sounded extra emphatic. She was responding from the stage to a late-arriving audience member, who felt that "we...
In the series In Perspective, Erik Akkermans looks back and ahead at developments in cultural policy and practice. Today: cultural education in primary education. Ambitions of a new cabinet Spring 2003. The sun began to shine a little more and branches began to blossom. Here presented the metaphor that could serve as a title for the report that...
The 'Access to Culture' advice presented by the Council for Culture on Friday 25 January 2024 is causing quite a stir. The newsletter we wrote about it on Substack was eagerly received, even though it did not ask, let alone answer, all the questions raised by the advice. Since, at 230 pages, it has also become a rather voluminous document, it...
The tenth and final Critic's Choice programme at IFFR: anything that provokes conversation.
People do not have equal access to culture in the Netherlands. This is because the supply of culture varies greatly from region to region. Also, artists or cultural institutions do not yet have an equal chance of financial support everywhere. There are calls for change from the cultural and creative field. Therefore, at the request of the State Secretary for Culture and Media on 26 January, the Council for Culture...
It was a chilly Thursday evening before Christmas 2023 and a grim atmosphere hung in the wedding hall of the old Utrecht city hall. Where during the day countless Utrechters were saying yes to each other, two partners were now facing each other. They no longer looked at each other, each had gathered their own supporters. Angry words rang out from one, bewildered words from the other. Members...
'Nina Hiddema and the supervisory board have concluded that this is a natural time for Nina to step down.' Nice sentence in the press release that appeared in the mailbox on 15 January. De Reisopera, the Enschede-based opera company that performs operas especially for everything outside Amsterdam and Maastricht, is bidding farewell to director Nina Hiddema after two years. Whether it...
"There is a fear among the artistic middle class of oversimplification, as if working-class people are not smart enough for art. I find that really insulting. My great-grandfather would be offended." I found this combative quote in The Mill, an extremely successful local news site for the Greater Manchester Area, a kind of northern English Randstad with a few million inhabitants. It...
"In the short term, the threat comes from black-racial activists and their leftist slaves. A very small group of activists with an obsession with skin colour have opened the frontal attack on the symbols of Western culture. They claim to speak for all of black Holland. This must eventually end in reparations because of slavery and job quotas against whites, like in South Africa....
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