The False Note: The Civil Servant as the Artist's Arch-enemy

Last Wednesday, NRC presented the results of the combined intellectual efforts of seven grey heads, each nodding gently on the shoulders of a senior civil servant in the cultural sector. All seven, it turns out from the article “From Now On, We Will Enforce Diversity in Art Through Subsidies”, have heard a bell ringing somewhere. It is time to put a definitive end to the unfair distribution of the arts-funding spoils, so introducing diversity among the recipients is now priority number one.

That is as far as the fist-shaking in this piece goes. Everything else, including the crucial interpretation of the term “diversity”, remains entirely ambiguous and vague. The whole business thus immediately reveals itself as an elevated form of cultural indifference, so characteristic of the left-wing governing class. As long as this class hands out the subsidies, every pledge of “broad diversity” is evidence of an imagination running wild. It is hardly a secret that, for more than twenty years now, obtaining a subsidy has meant wholeheartedly propagating progressive, left-wing ideas.

Are you a man who photographs naked women? Then you do so because you want to explore female truth in all its emancipated complexity. You make difficult, critical art films because you want to keep the left-wing mind sharp. As an artist with a respectable migrant background, you may reassure the alienated funding official with a non-threatening reflection of the caricature of diversity that already exists in the official's head. This insight came through very clearly in writer Özcan Akyol's criticism of the endlessly recurring variations on the theme of “the fig tree and the talking sheep”, guaranteed to win the approval of the Dutch cultural bureaucracy. It is precisely this caricature of “the good immigrant” that also ensures that serious artists with a migrant background, such as Akyol or the rapper Boef, emerge outside the subsidy milieu.

But that does not mean nothing good comes out of subsidy culture. The tradition by which the funding institution protects itself against its own destructive orthodoxy is, in fact, beautiful. Since it can hardly maintain that its democratic legitimacy derives from the degree to which it reflects the entire population — ha! — it must subordinate itself to the critical function that remains to it: as long as it honours, however reluctantly, the principle that criticism is always permissible, it legitimises its existence. And that means the troublesome applicant always holds one trump card with which to get around the ideologically biased committee: criticism is allowed, and is even necessary.

In this way, an artistic tradition grows out of the hand that dispenses subsidies, characterised by the cheerful, impudent way it questions social democracy, makes fun of it and, in doing so, serves it. Gerard Reve, the VPRO of the 1980s and 1990s, Theo van Gogh and KIRAC are all exponents of this subsidy culture. It is a culture that produces artists who are in conflict with the very culture that produces them. The underlying Enlightenment principle protects anyone capable of engaging in this struggle against the committee's ideological whims, and thereby also safeguards the emancipatory character of this culture.

The moment this Enlightenment principle is sold off, nothing remains to protect the artist against exclusion on ideological grounds. That is precisely what is at stake now that these seven bureaucratic figures promise that, in their quest for diversity, they will henceforth disregard every “false note in the discussion”. With one small gesture, they undermine everything that makes subsidy culture democratic and progressive.

It is not for the civil servant to decide what is false and what is not. It is the artist who gives the false note a place in the work, shows it for what it is and gives it meaning within the larger whole.

Kate Sinha (1988) and Stefan Ruitenbeek (1982) together form the art-critical platform KIRAC: Keeping It Real Art Critics.