At Rietveld and Sandberg my hobby brings all the neoliberal boys to the yard
Responsibility: We are primarily responsible for the development of our students, and thus for the education of future generations of artists and designers who can continue and deepen artistic practice. We share responsibility for their position in society. As an educational institute, as an employer and as an institution that presents itself in the cultural field, we are responsible for the profession and for its practitioners. More than ever, we feel responsible for an open culture in which all students, instructors and staff can feel at home. We take responsibility for our part in creating a humane and liveable world by striving for a conscious relationship with each other and with material. In everything, we are responsible for being a place of art.
Gerrit Rietveld Academie Institutional Plan 2020–2025
My hobby are the cartels
In February 2009 breathing right wing meme Geert Wilders declared that art was “a leftist hobby”. His statement which can still be found on the PVV website read (translation mine):
"The cabinet must now make major cuts in all those left-wing hobbies such as the billions spent on the European Union, development aid, environmental and art subsidies, problem neighborhoods, civic integration and so on. These billions must be used to reduce the burden on citizens significantly to boost the economy”.
His statement became a call for action from artists, students and creative workers who plastered red stickers over art and design objects and installations naming them as the by product of “leftist hobbies”.
For the last 14 years, Wilders’ words have been doing work in our sociopolitical milieu. Those words became memetic in the sense that they became part of public discourse. Rather than spend time articulating how those words did work for the past 14 years, I recall Jim McGuigan’s essay “The Neoliberal Self”:
As David Harvey argues, then, neoliberalism is not only economic policy and hard-nosed politics but it actually frames the meaning of everyday reality for people: ‘Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse... [with] pervasive effects’. So, as well as promoting ‘the market’ not only in the economic but also in the political field (i.e. ‘liberal democracy’) of contemporary capitalism, neoliberalism is implicated in an ideological battle for hearts and minds over everything, most insidiously by influencing the very language that is used mundanely. As Bourdieu & Wacquant maintain, there is a ‘new planetary vulgate’ articulated in the now tediously familiar lexicon of ‘NewLiberalSpeak’.
And I want to stress this: “neoliberalism is implicated in an ideological battle for hearts and minds over everything, most insidiously by influencing the very language that is used mundanely”.
So, it is in this context that eight years after Geert Wilders diagnosed art as a leftist hobby, Thierry Baudet, leader of the extreme right party Forum for Democracy referred to the “art cartel” as something to be dismantled. In a now deleted post on the website of Forum for Democracy (still archived by the Parlementaire Monitor), under the title “Break the Art Cartel!” the Party’s stance on art is thusly explained:
This vicious circle of money that perpetuates hideousness will have to be broken in order to restore the art world to its former glory.
There is a genealogical line we can trace between Wilders “leftist hobby” and Baudet’s “art cartel”. As the website “Taalbank” explains:
“[Art cartel] becomes a political term, comparable to the critical PVV term 'leftist hobby'. Cartel has a negative connotation of its own, and connecting this to the name of an art form automatically casts what is referred to in a negative light”.
Since Wilders incendiary take about art in 2009, we have seen a chronic cycle of budget cuts in the arts and cultural sectors. Defunding became normalised. Institutions have had to either shut down entirely or be reduced to bare bones structures, constantly struggling to find money to execute programs. The art and design schools have not fared better since they also had to contend with the double bind of budget cuts in arts and in education. The association of art with hobbies also implied that art making is an amateur’s pursuit rather than a professional discipline deserving of resources.
Designating art as a hobbyist pursuit was instrumental in this normalisation of defunding practices. If art is merely a hobby then, this hobby ethos can be mobilized by policy makers and governments in the deepening of neoliberal objectives to dismantle public resources and shift responsibility for art onto individual citizens who engage in art or design in their spare time and with their own resources.
New Manager on the block
In September 2022, the Supervisory Board of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie appointed an interim director, Cees in 't Veld. Mr. in ’t Veld’s job was introduced to the community as necessary to address serious budgetary concerns created by years of accountancy related issues that kept revealing how certain funds had not been properly allocated in the books. We were told that Mr. in ’t Veld was coming to bring order to what was presented to us as a chaotic situation, one step away from intervention by the Ministry of Education itself. Rumours of Rietveld being shut down were rampant at the time. The current threat voiced in both formal and informal settings is that the academy itself will be absorbed by a larger institution, effectively removing our autonomy as an almost century old art school. As a result of this financial situation, it was made clear at the beginning of this academic year that we at Gerrit Rietveld Academie / Sandberg Instituut are facing drastic budget cuts. The entire academy has been shaken to the core with news that from now on, we are operating an institution in extreme financial distress.
During his tenure as interim director Mr. in 't Veld met with many of us. He asked questions about what we do. I recall my meeting with him as congenial. He seemed interested in understanding the different parts of the organization. Eventually, his role as interim director came to an end. However, he is still part of the organization in some function that has not been entirely clarified (at least not that I am aware). My understanding is that currently he is some form of financial controller (although I insist, this function has not been made clear to the broader community). While trying to find his current job title or function, I came across his LinkedIn profile where he lists his expertise as a consultant who is focused on reorganisations and financial challenges. It makes sense that at Rietveld he would be focused on budget issues. In his profile, Mr. in 't Veld states that his core work values are trust and mutual respect.
His current involvement with the institution became apparent when he recently held a meeting with heads of bachelor departments at Rietveld. Several sources confirmed that other people, including the director of Studium Generale were also present. In this meeting, Mr. in 't Veld explained to the heads of department the different challenges faced by the necessary budget cuts implemented to bring the school’s financials to a healthy state. At some point, when reviewing the different aspects of spending, he pointed out to research within Rietveld and Sandberg and he observed that at the school, research is the place where “people execute their hobbies”. The implication of his words alarmed several attendees who felt unease at the way that research was singled out. To recall previous paragraphs on the significance of pronouncing that a discipline is merely a hobby, Mr. in 't Veld implied that research at Rietveld and Sandberg is simply an amateur pursuit, something better left to private citizens who can do it in their free time. The logical conclusion of this statement would be that there is no place in the budget for hobbies and amateur pursuits.
It is my understanding that Studium Generale did not fare better in this meeting, with Mr. in 't Veld suggesting it is another program that costs too much and brings little value.
His self stated core values of trust and mutual respect acquire a new dimension when he is specifically singling out people for a metaphorical (budget) axe. Moreover, this is another strategy that is deployed: put people and organisations in competition with one another all vying for the same limited resources. When heads of department hear that they will have less money, their expected response would be to suggest that money comes from somewhere, elsewhere, someone else. If research is a hobby, then why not shut down research and better spend that money elsewhere, in proper education and not merely a dilettante’s pastime?
That an accountant gets to validate the curricular content at the art and design academy is an alarming development in and by itself. However, in turn, this has created an entirely unsafe work environment where I get to hear random opinions about the value of the work we do. Such as “[Person in operations - always named by full name] thinks we should shut down research because it costs too much”; [Person in HR - also named by full name] has been reviewing the numbers and believes that research should be let go of”. Every day it is the same litany of people who believe the solution to the budget problems should come at the expense of my and my colleagues jobs. And this is not limited to research only. Every day I hear a new proposal of which department or initiative should be shut down so that the money can be better allocated. This has created a very difficult atmosphere where people talk in hush tones and there is an air of suspicion over everyone you encounter wondering if they also advocated for you to lose your job.
How is this unsafe work environment congruent with the ethical values expressed in the school’s mission statement? How is the social safety of everyone (students, tutors, staff) upheld when we have to constantly advocate for someone else to lose their job in a climate of numbers driven cruelty where an accountant implicitly tasks us with the unsavoury burden of atoning for management oversights and lack of funds? I insist on this point from the Mission Statement: “we feel responsible for an open culture in which all students, instructors and staff can feel at home. We take responsibility for our part in creating a humane and liveable world by striving for a conscious relationship with each other”.
Rather than feeling at home, we are cannibalising ourselves to compensate for the fact that the Dutch government itself has been reducing us (and the art sector in general) to a barely functioning institution. More importantly, even though we are at an art and design school where the human experience (and the emotions) are supposedly at the centre, we seem to have lost sight that in every discussion about money there are human beings whose livelihoods are at stake. Accountancy has reduced us to numbers on a spreadsheet where our value appears to be reflected on the number that can be moved to another column in the file rather than people who need to cover the basic necessities of life.
One Way Street towards the precarious life
Mr. in 't Veld’s words about my (and my colleague’s) work being hobbies do not exist in a vacuum. A great portion of workers at Rietveld and Sandberg are precarious freelancers with absolutely no employment safety. Many people who are not freelancers are working under temporary contracts that require them to take six months off every two years so that they can come back for another two years and repeat this cycle. For years we got to hear that labor conditions could not be improved because this is in the best interest of students. According to this argument, students would refuse to have a stagnant tutor base that stays at the school for years. Instead, the claim is that students demand a revolving door of tutors and new people so that we are constantly ahead of new developments and trends. Nobody should grow old at the academy, we were told. Instead, we need a constant influx of new people and permanent contracts would make such influx impossible. After years of dealing with students I have never met a single one that wanted their tutors to live precarious lives. That this indecent labor construction was maintained in their name is unfair and unreasonable. This wasn’t done to satisfy students. These labor conditions were created so that the institution could transfer the costs to precarious workers rather than advocating for enough funds to function in line with the core values expressed in the Mission Statement. By employing a precarized labor force the academy was able to offer more (more programs, more tutors, more facilities), effectively transferring the cost of education and facilities to the workers. We often hear that at the school “we do so much with so little” but it was our precarious labor that enabled the school to function when in fact, the academy should have either demanded more funding or organise a political response to the lack of resources.
These days, the tune has changed. Now we get to hear from the people who manage things that this budget problem is the result of workers demanding rights. If only we continued to accept precarity, the institution could direct funds to things other than those pesky pensions, sick leave or vacation for workers. Instead, it is argued we (that is, the precarious workers) wanted to have rights so now some people will eventually get contracts but then there is no money left for department budgets. In an ironic twist, the people who manage things, almost all white and native Dutch, invariably have long term employment that sometimes for decades has included pensions, sick leave and vacation. It is us, the precarious who constitute a burden to the functioning of the institution rather than the decades long budget cuts and a succession of Dutch governments and political figures who have deemed art and design education to be expendable, indeed, like hobbies.
Fine Young Cannibals
We are eating each other and the institution itself is promoting this by positioning us as in direct competition with each other for the limited resources available. This home invoked in the school’s mission statement is more of a haunted house where the threats are coming from the inside. We are working in an environment where there is a general belief that our jobs should come at the expense of someone else’s. As the saying goes, the only way to win this game is by not playing it.
Julia Becker in her essay “Neoliberalism can reduce well-being by promoting a sense of social disconnection, competition, and loneliness” writes:
the neoliberal self is an entrepreneurial subject whose philosophy recommends that individuals pursue an imperative for personal growth and fulfilment by competing with each other. Here, a growing body of work suggests that this state of interpersonal competition can have a negative impact on people – especially if it is prolonged and inescapable. In particular, this is because it places the responsibility for success on people’s own shoulders and, in the process, weakens broader solidarities that might otherwise buffer them against failure
I will not spend extensive time defending myself and the value I bring to the school at large because I strongly believe the sheer volume of my work speaks for itself. Besides, I believe the current situation is not about the value of individual work but about a loss of solidarity and collective action. We are supposed to defend ourselves individually so that someone else who might not do so as vehemently can take our place in the cuts. My work as a writer or researcher might not be to everyone’s liking or interest but no work ever is. However, I will strongly say this: neither I nor my colleagues are hobbyists. I have decades of work under my name and I have made considerable effort to make my work public and available for anyone who would want to read it or listen to it. At the school I have been honoured to work with extremely capable and highly professional people, from coordinators to other researchers, fellows, tutors and heads of department. In all my years working at Sandberg I never met a single person whose work could be characterised as a hobby. Instead, I met a diversity of practitioners researching urgent matters in art and design. I take personal offence in the fact that the school’s accountant (or whatever his function might be) refers to me or my colleagues as hobbyists. This man holds our future in his hands and I refuse to let his dismissive words slide without taking a stand. We are not hobbyists. We are researchers, makers and producers and I am proud of that.
Join me for a public reading at the Rietveld Sandberg garden on Wednesday April 26th at 1 PM (I am doing this at 1 PM so that my hobby does not interfere with classes). If it rains, we will seek shelter under the roof at the entrance of the Rietveld building.