Bruce Sterling comments on the philistinism of the current Dutch government’s arts policies:
“There are absolutely no policy reasons for the €200 million of cutbacks. This deal was struck with the PVV in exchange for its support in parliament of the minority cabinet. The intention is to inflict irreparable damage on an entire profession. Zijlstra is striving to decimate and eliminate this professional group’s creative, innovative and critical potential. Not a single member of his own party (VVD), or anyone from its coalition partner, the CDA (Christian Democratic Party) has opposed him. As far as they are concerned, traditional art is merely the superfluous ornamentation of a society. Contemporary art is labelled as alienating, and even, although no one actually says it out loud, as ‘degenerate art’.
The notion of “entarte kunst” does fit in well with the rightwing “populism” of the PVV and Wilders, as I also noted yesterday, but as Bruce Sterling indicates, the betrayal of the art by the supposedly respectable CDA and VVD is just as nihilistic. This is something that would not have been possible twenty or even ten years ago, but a decade of relentless rightwing philistinism in which everything had to be reappraised solely for its commercial potential has eroded the sense of social responsibility these parties used to hold. Obviously, there have alwas been disagreements over the arts and funding thereof; what’s new is the idea that they shouldn’t be funded at all, apart from very respectable high culture institutes like the Rijksmuseum or Concertgebouw. This is an ideologically driven attack, one that wants to make art safe for the rich and only aimed at their tastes.