Art Subsidies and U.S. Higher Ed

The Dutch ended up with warehouses full of pieces nobody wanted. We have piles of worthless degrees

By Reuven Brenner. Excerpts:

"When the Dutch government set up the Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling (Visual Artists Scheme, or BKR) in 1949, its goal was to help struggling artists become financially independent. The government closed the program on Jan. 1, 1987, as it cost a fortune and produced nothing."

"Nothing but tens of thousands of self-declared “artists,” and new and enlarged “art institutes” to certify them, and hundreds of thousands of “artworks” that nobody wanted. In 1986, the last year of the program’s existence, the agency paid out the equivalent of $100 million (in today’s dollars) a year in stipends of up to $50,000—not counting the cost of administration and air-conditioned storage facilities for the art."

"the BKR started as an open-ended scheme under the Social Affairs Ministry, with no fixed amount allocated in the national budget. Municipalities could claim 75% of the amount a BKR “artist” cost them from Social Affairs and recoup 80% of the remaining 25% from the Interior Ministry’s municipal fund. Thus the program cost local governments only 5% of what they spent—cheaper than having the “artist” in a welfare program, to which they had to contribute 10%."

"the program was supposed to help some 100 young artists through postwar hard times. It quickly expanded. Anyone who showed up with a drawing, painting or sculpture at a municipal office could hand it over to the bureaucrats in charge and get a compensation he could live on—no questions asked. Amsterdam alone had about 1,500 artists in the BKR in 1985. The number of students at expanding “art academies” rose sharply too, to 12,000 in 1987 from 2,000 in 1949."

"As the costs of the program increased, the agency asked applicants to prove they had sold $4,000 worth of art privately and donate up to four works to the government each year. It requires little imagination to design wonderful fraud opportunities for all parties involved with such programs in place—which they did.

When the scheme ended in 1987, the Cultural Heritage Agency had 221,000 items, the municipalities 300,000. The minister of welfare, public health and culture decreed that 20,000 works had “museum status,” even though the program didn’t produce a single artist of reputation. The others had to be disposed of."