Rijksmuseum Twente can probably stay open now that culture minister Jet Bussemaker (PvdA) has promised the chamber to halve the planned 50% cut in operations. Moreover, she is going to fight hard to keep the Cultural and Artistic Formation subject in secondary education as a compulsory examination subject 'left or right',
We are just reporting the press release in full. For your information. Every now and then, more news like this comes along. We don't post them all, because that would make the world very bleak. The world as many people knew it, and which they thought was the pride of the Netherlands, is coming to a squeaking halt to make room for. Well. We will report on that in the years to come. Of what comes in its place.
The previous Secretary of State for Culture, Halbe Zijlstra, made his draconian cuts cast in concrete. The 35-40 per cent cut in the budgets of orchestras, theatre companies and some museums has become law. The new minister of culture, PvdA star Jet Bussemaker, cannot change that at all an iota. And if she even wanted to: the architect of the cuts she has to allow sits in the chamber as the ruling party's group leader. No chance That he will allow his policies to go down the drain.
Anyway: while Amsterdam's city newspaper Parool was embarking on a campaign against the Dutch capital's city company at the behest of the Flemish publishing board, the same Toneelgroep Amsterdam was winning the hearts of New York audiences with a production of the already years-old 'Roman Tragedies', which a few here did not even like overall: http://www.wijbrandschaap.nl/2007/06/romeinse-tragedies-hf2007ta/
We too retweeted it: "Germany increases culture subsidy by 100 million". And we thus fed a half-truth. That half-truth is, that Germany is a heaven for culture lovers, a haven for people fed up with the chilly austerity of the Rutte governments. Germany may seem nice, but, As Volkskrant correspondent Merlijn Schoonenboom noted in March this year, cuts are being made there at least as hard as here.
The Netherlands' most remarkable company when it comes to handling grant money has been saved. The Theatre newspaper reports that the central government has agreed to the new adjusted budget, which had to be prepared after earlier this year a loss of over 2 million euros had arisen. So the company keeps the one and a half million euros and artistic director Jos Thie and his business partner Jelle Snijder are chased out of the city with pitch and feathers, where they can join the Supervisory Board that had already turned a little too blind eye. After all, putting in an overpriced production to make up for the deficit from an earlier run of that same overpriced production: no entrepreneur would ever allow that.
The discussion was and is endless, but now we have figures. Thanks to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science's new 'key figures', we now know how much the state (all of us) are spending for the opportunity to experience art: per inhabitant, the state spends 38.90 per year on subsidies for dance, theatre, museums, youth theatre, opera and orchestras. So that's just over 3 euros a month. Indeed something to get into each other's hair about, we think.
PUNCH! is a fantastic festival. It shows how much beauty, news and surprise is created when the line between dance and performance is dissolved. PUNCH! promotes a refreshing view of the world and shakes loose entrenched interpretations. The young dance makers and performers show tremendous originality and creativity that you will not only enjoy watching, you will go...
Theatre-maker Anouk de Bruijn (32) has been to Guatemala seven times since 1999. For the Treaty of Utrecht, she entered into an exchange project with the Guatemalan group Caja Lúdica. Together, they are committed to giving people a positive experience through art. Their project 'Hidden War' is about the lives of young people in Guatemala.
What could be the matter with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev Festival - the official name to emphasise its international appeal anyway? As soon as you enter concert hall de Doelen, you immediately get the feeling that you have arrived at an ordinary, weekday concert, even though Valeri Gergiev is on the posters. No decoration of the large rooms...
Theatre company the Utrecht Games, city company of the Netherlands' fourth largest city, is on the brink of bankruptcy. It was recently revealed that the company led by artistic and business director Jos Thie has a deficit of €2.1 million. Correspondence that has since surfaced shows that it was already clear in May this year that the problems were getting out of hand. That was a month after the Utrecht subsidy advisory committee issued its laudatory opinion, and a few weeks before the Council for Culture issued its very thrifty advice.
Halbe Zijlstra is proud of his policy, and keen to come and tell it in front of the entire cultural sector. So on Sunday 26 August, he appeared on stage during the annual 'Paradiso Debate' to reiterate how well things had gone with the 200 million cut in the arts sector. He praised the resilience of the affected art world, and would be happy to do the same again.
The major research and management consulting firm Berenschot has calculated that, on balance, the cuts to the arts turn out to be not too bad. Client of the study, De Volkskrant, then headlined that big. And indeed, it is kind of good news that the pile-up of cuts (the state 24% less, the provinces 20% less and the municipalities only 9 % less) is so low in net terms. We were surprised for a moment, but when we asked around, we found out
Yet money for the National Academy of Visual Arts, money for an orchestra merger in the south of the Netherlands and 4.7 million for a knowledge institute for amateur art. The clear-cutting of the Dutch cultural sector has become a little less extreme thanks to a second advice from the Council for Culture. Besides the aforementioned positive assessment, there is also money for a knowledge institute for the creative sector
Maastricht is going to do things differently. Starting next year, the city council will determine what art is needed, and art institutions will be allowed to submit plans that fit within that framework. If their plans do not comply, they will not get any money. Sounds nice, but the capital of Limburg is treading on thin ice.
I would like to take a moment to put this one to you. Quote from this morning's volkskrant, where editor Harmen Bockma makes a valiant attempt to list all the figures of culture carnage, but fails a little in doing so. It also remains difficult to identify the breakdown in the basic infrastructure add to the dropout at the fund, but it is proving altogether difficult to discern what
On Wednesday 1 August 2012, the Performing Arts Fund will announce the results of the lottery that granting arts subsidies has now become. Huge cuts are looming: companies and creators that by now seemed to be a permanent part of the Dutch arts landscape will disappear. Exactly what it will look like, we know
It is now becoming clear where the laissez faire-laissez mourir (let it be done, let it die) policy of Halbe Zijlstra, Martin Bosma and Mark Rutte will lead. Of the dozens of institutions that will close, downsize or die off in the coming months due to vacancy of quality staff, the demise of Theatre Institute of the Netherlands (TIN) is starting to take on very tragic proportions.
He is a professor of it, so if there is a problem in the economics of culture, Arjo Klamer knows about it. He says there has been growing resentment against subsidies for years. So the arts sector will have to get used to making a living in a different way from now on.
Hein Janssen (Volkskrant) wrote a column in response to a couple of performances with BN stars in the subsidised circuit in which he argued that subsidy was not meant for that. The association for actors thought this was reason enough for a debate. We made a short film to go with it. We formatted it in storify, a feature that allows you to put tweets and other social media messages together and...
Art subsidies are better abolished if artists have to reach large audiences. Because then, after all, you distort the market. Logical. You could also decide to subsidise everyone. And that sounds stranger than
“Het is momenteel niet mogelijk om de ontwikkeling van deze kenmerken van de cultuursector betrouwbaar te voorspellen, laat staan wat de invloed van de bezuinigingen daarop is. Bewegingen in de zaken die in de vraag zijn genoemd zijn van veel factoren afhankelijk. Ten eerste ontbreken
For the unions, it is not all that bad: because of the mega-cuts to the arts, they have to 800 people laid off will be. That is almost nothing compared to, say, the bankrupt Nedcar, where redundancies at a single location may be double or more.
To bring in an extra five tonnes, the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra and the Gelderland Orchestra are pulling together. And with success: the provincial governments of Overijssel and Gelderland are absorbing the state's subsidy cut. However, it now turns out that the plans used to rake in that bailout are dubious. Politicians have hardly looked into it. Questions about the business plan came mainly from the PVV in Overijssel, but in Gelderland that same party enthusiastically agreed to the injection of millions after a - remarkably damning - counter-expertise.
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