<nettime> Sven Lütticken: Slash & Burn

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

(There is much more to say about this--and there will be--but this is  
the first article in English about the cuts in the Dutch arts budget.  
There will be a debate about this in parliament on June 27. The  
proposal as it is laid out here is not final, but in a few weeks there  
will be one. The exact implications for institutions like Waag  
Society, V2 and Mediamatic are not yet known. The article below only  
deals with visual arts in a narrow sense (read: 'contemporary arts')  
but the remnication in other sectors such as theatre are even more  
damaging. /Geert)

http://svenlutticken.blogspot.com/2011/06/slash-burn.html

Sven Lütticken: Slash & Burn
On Friday afternoon June 10 the Dutch secretary of state for culture,  
Halbe Zijlstra, published his policy plan for coming years. In  
contrast to the official recommendations given to him by the Raad voor  
Cultuur (an advisory body), the cutbacks will not be spread out over a  
number of years, but will take immediate effect in 2013. The budget  
for visual art will shrink from 53,3 to 31 million. If Dutch politics  
is marked by a tension between populist rhetoric and neoliberal dreams  
of market-driven excellence, this paper is dominated squarely by the  
latter, though it takes the form of a kind of scorched earth politics  
that will find the approval of Zijlstra’s de facto coalition partner,  
Geert Wilders’ PVV.

Among the more damaging and destructive decisions is the complete  
cutting of funding for the following (which in most cases will mean  
their disappearance):

-The so-called post-academic art schools; these include the De  
Ateliers, the Rijksakademie and the Jan van Eyck. These institutions  
have been instrumental in fostering international exchange among young  
artists and a less anti-intellectual, more discursive culture in the  
Dutch art world. They offer a number of young artists (and, in the  
case of the Jan van Eyck, theorists) a stimulating context for  
residencies during which they can continue to develop their practice.  
Their disappearance would leave a gaping hole.

-The NIMK (formerly Montevideo), an institution for video and media  
art. It seems that museums should simply take over the collection.  
Media art as a field with specific requirements is history—a history  
that will of course not be written, for the happy people of Polderland  
under VVD, CDA and PVV have no need for history. A national canon is  
more than enough.

-All but six “presentation institutions” (as local jargon has it). To  
be precise, six of these institutions will be allowed into the  
“Basisinfrastructuur” and get structural funding. Others will be left  
to fend for themselves (for specific projects, they may be able to get  
incidental funding from a diminished Mondriaan Fonds—the merged  
Mondriaan Stichting and Fonds BKVB). On the Metropolis M website,  
Dominiek Ruyters speculates that these six institutions will be Witte  
de With, de Appel, BAK, Marres, Noorderlicht, De Vleeshal. Some of  
these names would seem to be on the list mainly because of a holy cow  
called “cultuurspreiding” (spread of culture). This cow is worshiped  
with particular zeal by Zijlstra’s Christian democratic collation  
partners of the CDA. In short: art for the provinces, where the CDA’s  
remaining voters reside. Hence (supposedly) Noorderlicht in Groningen,  
De Vleeshal in Middelburg and Marres in Maastricht. That the first two  
in particular are far less relevant than a number of institutions  
based in the main cities is is irrelevant. It has also been decided  
that each of the main cities can only have one institution in the  
Basisinfrastructuur, so if De Appel is in this means automatically  
that no other Amsterdam-based institution can be, for that reason  
alone. What was that thing about excellence again?

-SKOR, the Dutch foundation for public art and its journal Open. The  
Sekula and Burch film the Forgotten Space, which I review in the new  
Texte zur Kunst, would not exist without SKOR. While I have been  
extremely critical of the Dutch tradition of "public art" in which art  
is often supposed to  stand in for the social, in recent years SKOR  
has started to develop in an interesting way. It is now called  
"Foundation for Art and Public Domain," indicating the transition from  
a narrow understanding of “public art” to a more fundamental  
engagement with the notion of publicness in different fields, virtual  
as well as physical. Open, published by SKOR, spearheaded this  
transition under Jorinde Seijdel’s editorship, and it has been a rare  
local publication (published in a Dutch and an English edition) that  
can articulate important issues and shape debates in a way that goes  
beyond the horizon of neo-provincialism.

The Dutch art world is marked by a plethora of frequently complacent  
institutions and an arcane array of subsidy channels, so some  
downsizing need not be disastrous. However, almost halving the budget  
is patently disproportionate and wantonly destructive. What's more, in  
many ways this plan is an unholy alliance of ideological dogmatism and  
cowardly compromises. Excellence and the market, yes, but let’s not  
forget about the people in the province of Zeeland. Let’s glorify  
international success as the ultimate proof of excellence while  
abolishing the Rijksakademie and the Jan Van Eyck and turn Holland  
into a stagnant backwater. Let’s claim to be confident that “the  
market” can fix things on short notice and stand by the dogma that  
noble private patrons are just itching to support the arts while  
showing our contempt for these arts with every gesture and every   
utterance, suggesting that potential patrons would really be better  
off buying a yacht.

There is an odd proposal in Zijlstra’s plan to offer support for fifty  
“top talents,” again using the language of excellence; but if these  
are the top talents, shouldn’t they of all people be able to fend for  
themselves, according to Zijlstra’s logic? And where will these  
talents be allowed to develop if not at the Jan van Eyck or the  
Rijksakademie? Far from stemming purely from the need for financial  
cutbacks, these are punitive and vindictive measures that appear to be  
designed to destroy all that stands in the way the reduction of art to  
mind-numbing blockbuster events and glossy decoration. Nothing could  
be more political and ideological than this brand of economism.

Meanwhile, the situation at the universities is hardly less grim.  
Suddenly notions such as "the knowledge economy" and "creative  
industries," which have been crucial shibboleths of the Dutch version  
of social-democratically inflected neoliberal politicy-making, don’t  
seem to be worth a penny. Or rather, they show their true face: they  
always were at the service of imposing a relentlessly economistic  
logic on education and art, resulting in a re-establishment of strong  
class divisions. Either you can afford education and art or be  
educated in the arts), or you can’t. Bright young art and humanities  
students today face becoming a lost generation. That’s the culture of  
excellence for you: social engineering under the guise of letting “the  
market” take its "natural" course.


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