Conflicts of interest in culture sector affect mores.online. What about subsidies?

This weekend, Mariëtte Hamer came up with a strong recommendation for the hotline mores.online. The club where cross-border behaviour within the arts and media world can be reported had itself become discredited. The chairman, for instance, as partner of the discredited Tom Egbers at NOS Sport, had not responded to that fuss in a helpful way. It did not contribute to trust among people in the sector, who consider reporting inappropriate behaviour by a superior, in a sector where everyone knows everyone and interdependence is huge.

Hamer's main advice goes quite far. Namely, she does not insist that everyone involved in the hotline must have a clean record, but goes a step further: the assessors and handlers should have no connection with the industry.

You could read this as a vote of no confidence in the cultural and media sector. Maybe we should. Although the question is whether that will solve anything.

For you a hundred others

As on this site more often described the power structure in the art sector (I am leaving the media world aside for the moment) is quite unhealthy. There are a lot of people who want to do something in the arts, if you just look at the number of mbo and hbo courses that do something with art, while the number of places where you can get a nice paid job is comparatively enormous.

That gives people with decision-making power over who can work where a lot of power. If you have a complaint, well-founded or otherwise, about one of those people, you are taking a huge risk if you want to work on it. Especially as an unprotected self-employed person, although you are not safe in salaried employment either.

For anyone with a sour voice in the sector, there are not 10, but 100 replacements ready, who make less trouble. That is enough reason to keep quiet and continue to tolerate existing misbehaviour.

Note: the vast majority of people working in the arts are virtuous, idealistic, inspired, committed and concerned about humanity, but people in the arts are also just people to whom nothing human is alien. If, as a manager, you can choose between someone who is good, but known to be a nag, and someone with the same papers, who is never difficult, it is tempting to sideline the nag.

Peer review

So if, according to rapporteur Mariëtte Hamer, it is difficult to have the hotline for transgressive behaviour staffed by people from the sector, because of conflicts of interest, what about peer review when it comes to awarding grants? We can by now fill a small book of cases of whether or not wilful norm violation in allocation procedures, to the Council for Culture to.

Now, committees of advisers are a reasonable safeguard against too much scope for personal rancour and conflicts of interest, but groupthink is a risk there too. As Ellen Hardy demonstrates in her doctoral research, can you always prove that the rejection of your grant application was due to unsound, personal motives among the committee members?

Transparency is an issue

We have, with constant reference to the Thorbeck doctrine forbidding substantive political interference in the arts, placed the assessment of grant applications with the arts sector itself: artists and other experts assess each other. One might wonder whether the negatives of this are beginning to overshadow the positives.

Is that one committee member being obstructive for artistic reasons, or because he once got blue in the face with the applicant, or politically disagrees with his views? In the podcast with Renée Steenbergen and Ellen Hardy it becomes clear that transparency on this is a tremendous problem.

Citizens' jury

So Mariette Hamer's opinion on Mores.online does also put a small bomb under the system we have built together under subsidy allocation. So should we move towards a system there too, where the evaluation is entirely technical and independent? Should we move towards citizen juries? Or draw lots?

The fact remains that the assessment system of subsidies cannot be separated from the study of healthy working relationships within the sector. Quite a tough question for the redesign of the Basic Infrastructure, which they are now working on in The Hague et al. The issue of codes of diversity, governance and fair practice are inextricably linked to it, though.