Florian Cramer on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:35:29 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> New Media Art Organisations in Netherlands lose funding |
Some comments/remarks from someone living and working in the Netherlands, more or less in the same sector (but only in education). It's not correct that the new media arts organizations will lose their funding completely. At the moment, the situation is not completely clear yet. What is known for sure: - NiMK (Netherlands Institute for Media Art, still better known as Montevideo) will lose its funding. - "e-culture" ("e-cultuur") as a sector of the arts funding system will be scrapped and be moved into a new sector "creative industries". "E-culture" is a word of which many Dutch people may not know that it only exists in the Netherlands. It's not completely synonymous with media arts, but encompasses all activities in between information technology, digital media, the arts, design and social aspects of new technology. The word originated with the organization "Virtual Platform" in Amsterdam. In the past couple of years, it grew more broadly into a "sector" of cultural funding, next to other "sectors" like visual arts, music, performing arts, film etc. The organizations receiving public funding within this sector are rather diverse: STEIM (an institute for experimental electronic music), Waag Society (nowadays a Creative Industries-oriented institute with particular orientation towards projects in health care, culture and school education), V2_ (organization for "unstable media", often in the form of interactive art/systems), WORM (a DIY-oriented space for off-mainstream music, film and media hacking), Mediamatic (research/educational organization for new media, culture and society). The funding budget for the "e-culture" sector will be moved into a new "Funds for the Creative Industries". This funds/sector will cover architecture and design next to new media. According to Dutch design critic Max Bruinsma [http://www.items.nl/2011/6/13/het-ministerie-van-de-markt/], it may be represented by a new "sector institute" created out of a fusion of Virtual Platform, Premsela ("Dutch Platform for Design and Fashion") and the Dutch Architecture Institute NAI. A sector planning for the creative industries in the Netherlands, which will also affect higher education, is currently by made under the leadership Victor van der Chijs, a former manager of the Schiphol Airport, ING Bank and currently of Rem Koolhaas' bureau OMA. It's often hard to understand for non-Dutch people that this country has a strong [and, all in all, quite successful] tradition of all-encompassing, top-down master plans for all areas of the country, from economy to urban development, infrastructure, education and culture. We're just witnessing the birth of an extremist new masterplan that will undo structures that have grown in the arts sometimes over centuries. Outside the "e-culture" sector, all post-academic art institutes will lose their funding completely and thus, with all probability, shut down. This includes the Jan van Eyck Academy, where a lot of Nettimers have been researchers or lecturers, and the traditional Rijksacademie, the oldest art academy of the Netherlands. What the new sector plan will really mean for the former "e-culture" organizations - aside from the fact that they will now be considered service institutions for the creative industries - is not fully clear yet. It could mean that they lose their base (structural) subsidies and will only receive project subsidies. On the other hand, most of these organizations receive a mix of national and local funding. Some of them, like WORM, have been receiving national funding since only a short period. By itself, the new policy concerns national funding only, but will likely form the framework for local funding as well, according to the Dutch "cultuurplan". The current cultuurplan period began in 2009 and will end in 2012, so the changes will be effective in 2013. Whoever considers this an odd marriage of socialist-style plan economy and market hyper-capitalism, is not completely off. It is, and always has been, one of the charms of this country. Halbe Zijlstra, Dutch minister of culture from the pro-business liberalist VVD party, has decided to abandon the e-culture sector against the recommendations in a commissioned rapport written an external consultancy. In the visual arts, which will be cut 50%, he has equally ignored the (previously requested) advice of the Dutch Arts Council. His memo is a document of the current wave of populism in Dutch politics: It states that, after WWII, the arts have been defined by a small group of experts and funded according to their taste. Today's society, according to Zijlstra, is more individualist and has a right to arts that cater to people's diverse tastes. By catering to them (and, by implication, becoming more popular/accessible), art institutions can finance themselves, with the exception of cultural heritage organizations whose function it is to preserve the memory of Dutch history worldwide, including (to cite one of his examples) coats of arms of Dutch ships in the colonies. Interestingly, net cultural concepts such as crowdfunding are being taken, turned around and heavily promoted by the Dutch government as way for arts organizations to finance themselves in the future. - Dutch higher education is being transformed according to the same policies. Florian -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org