Florian Cramer on Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:53:42 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Are we in 1935 Germany or 21st Century Netherlands? |
On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 5:20 AM, Heiko Recktenwald <heikorecktenwald@googlemail.com> wrote: > I am sorry, you are mixing two buzzwords, neoliberalism and fashism, that > say more or less nothing. I would put it differently: It's a politics of conservative resentment mixed with politbureau capitalism. The conservative resentment of the Dutch government is rather old-fashioned. What is new is only its outspokenness: the break with a postwar consensus, or political correctness, of not attacking modern art for being modern art. For Zijlstra, the secretary of culture and education, the arts have been dominated by a small elite - read: art councils, critics, intellectuals - that superimposed its minority taste on society, making it the majority agenda. And indeed, it is difficult to argue with this unless one thinks that funding should just go to those kind of places and projects that wouldn't be able to sustain themselves on the free market. (Which _is_ an elitist stance.) Yes, one could consider it unfair that a ticket for an experimental music concert is subsidized while the musical isn't. However, the Dutch government's agenda is not at all consistent in this respect. It wants to keep the subsidies of operas and the big museums untouched because they represent "the cultural heritage of the Netherlands". Zijlstra even adds the flags of Dutch colonial ships to his heritage list (which strongly reminds of the uproar in Hamburg when the city subsidized the ship museum of a right-wing militaria collector with millions while cutting heavily into contemporary arts). Another problem for people in the arts is that they are now forced into the same boat as those contemporary art institutions whose funding should be scrutinized because their curators put the same artists on publicly subsidized shows whom they also recommend, in their second jobs as private consultants, to art collectors. Or you are in the same boat with people paid a top salary as directors of communal cinemas that run the same boring mainstream Hollywood 'arthouse' films as the other, non-subsidized movie theater in town. In other words, you're pressured to protest in the streets hand-in-hand with people you'd rather demonstrate against. The problem is not necessarily that the arts are cut. The problem is how they're being cut, with almost everything not fitting an utterly uneducated notion of "cultural heritage" and completely deluded perceptions of "top art institutes" being forced into the creative industries. Why is this not neoliberalism? If this were classical neoliberal politics, there would be just a general cut of public funding, leaving things to the free market and cutting taxes. But this is not what is happening. Instead, taxpayer's art subsidies are repurposed into taxpayer's business subsidies. The advice of the "Top Team Creative Industries" (lead by the business manager of Rem Koolhaas' bureau OMA) to the Dutch government boils down to subsidizing economically promising Dutch creative industries businesses, for example service design companies. Of course, this is just a small part of a larger development. The bigger picture is that Europe, and the Western World, is rapidly moving towards the model of Chinese politbureau capitalism where governments act as supreme CEO boards, and public budgets are business investment money. Only that for the Western economies, its not investment into growth, but into preventing the ship from sinking. What started with the bail-outs and nationalization of the financial sector is now growing like virus into the rest of the economy. Instead of mobilizing all production means for a military war, it's the total mobilization for the global economic war. It seems to be the perfect fulfillment of what Rudolf Hilferding described in his 1910 book "Das Finanzkapital" ("The Financial Capital") as "state monopoly capitalism". -F -- 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