NRC Handelsblad — Then subsidise art critical of Islam too

Gerben Bakker, lecturer in Integrated Safety and Security Studies at The Hague University of Applied Sciences and doctoral candidate at Erasmus University. Gert Jan Geling, lecturer in Integrated Safety and Security Studies at The Hague University of Applied Sciences and doctoral candidate at Leiden University. Authors of Over Politieke Correctheid, to be published in September by Boom Uitgevers Amsterdam.

Diversity will no longer be the exception but the rule, the directors of six national cultural funds and UNESCO argued in NRC on Wednesday. Apparently, they consider what is on offer too monocultural — read: too white. According to these art pontiffs, the time has come to use subsidies to give priority to “other cultural stories”. In short, less Wagner for Amsterdam’s affluent Oud-Zuid, more refugee drama in the neighbourhood regeneration theatre.

The letter reveals a limited historical awareness and a poor understanding of the limits to engineering morality.

First, historical awareness. The Dutch cultural sector has revolved around diversity for decades. Nor is the objective of increasing cultural participation among minorities anything new.

The cultural policy papers of Nuis in 1996 and Van der Ploeg in 1999 went even further in their ambition: “In light of the development of the Netherlands as a multicultural society, the concept of quality used in assessing applications requires adjustment.” They even proposed punitive funding cuts to achieve this.

Diversity has now been the norm in cultural policy for so long that younger generations have never encountered any other ideology. Ideology, indeed, because diversity involves a political faith in social engineering, even though there is no evidence that societal diversity can be engineered by rewarding and punishing cultural initiatives. At most, the meagre result is that institutions frantically seek ways of boosting the multicultural content of their productions to avoid losing funding. It is no secret that they design their content around subsidy criteria. The kiss of death for artistic individuality, and damaging to autonomy and freedom of expression.

In its editorial on Nuis’s policy paper, “Backbone”, on 23 September 1996, NRC stated: “Cultural shielding and exclusion […] are the product of historical circumstances and economic forces. That is where policy should intervene. Anyone who saddles arts and cultural policy with objectives tailored to these issues […] invites the suspicion of wanting to shop for free in the supermarket of noble causes.”

We might also ask what exactly diversity means in this context. It seems reasonable to assume that the signatories primarily mean ethnic diversity, rather than diversity of perspectives. Does this include art critical of Islam, for example? And what about the art criticism platform Keeping It Real Art Critics, KIRAC, whose event at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie was cancelled earlier this year because the academy preferred to guarantee “a safe environment” rather than give art criticism free rein?

As long as this issue is systematically examined from only one side, diversity degenerates into a political ideology that actually nourishes polarisation.