Impressions of Amsterdam

What to say about Amsterdam...what to say about Amsterdam...

Well, for starters, people love their bicycles. After being in Brussels for close to a week, Amsterdam was definitely a change of pace. While Brussels was "crunchy," as I said earlier, Amsterdam was busy as hell. There's a million ways to get around the city, be it on the aforementioned bicycle, a tram, a train, a metro, a car, a cab, or just plain walking...everyone is going somewhere, almost all the time. It was actually reminiscent of New York City, which (maybe not) coincidentally was originally called New Amsterdam. I'm pretty sure that it's just a coincidence, but it sure reminded me of the go, go, go of NYC. As I said, coming from the more laid back and chilled out Brussels, Amsterdam is a hustle-and-a-bustle!

Some things learned from the Amsterdam experience: people like to get high...and it's easy. There's "coffee shops" everywhere and--although I am not a smoker--apparently it's as easy as pie to get high. Gotta love my rhyme though, right? Although that's the most basic concept of the city to a foreigner on his first trip, Amsterdam is actually a pretty complicated city overall...with that being said, so is Holland.

Lesson two: now's either a horrible time or the ideal time to be an artist in Holland. The Netherlands, aka Holland, has had a recent retooling of their government and the newest regime is one of a staunchly conservative nature. So much so that they're revamped the entire funding of the arts community system, putting many institutions at the brink of extinction in the process. It used to be that institutions could receive government grants on an annual basis after a common application was submitted and this was how the arts communities in Holland not only survived, but thrived as well...it really is quite the vibrant community when you look at it.

They have been doing more (dare I say) for contemporary arts in Amsterdam than I've seen in Chicago or my former city of San Antonio in the last few years. Don't take that the wrong way...I'm not saying there's nothing happening in these cities, but Amsterdam flat out has them buried, as you can read in the posts below. That brings us back to the current problem of reworking the system so that every single project must have it's own application versus the institutional applications for annual funding. The idea is to re-tool the system to be more like The USA's system of semi-private and commercial ownership over the arts. The effect is that many institutions are scrambling to figure how to survive.

Two such places (this might be breaking news), de Appel and SMART Project Space have decided to merge this year, in order to make the process easier on themselves. The theory here is that by merging, they are cutting down on the applicants applying for case-by-case funding. Not a bad idea necessarily and it seems like it's nothing new to this part of the world and particularly the Netherlands. Many institutions are venturing towards alternative forms of funding too, ranging from sales of artist's works to event planning to generating funding from private parties by creating charity drives. The feeling overall is that everything should work out for most places, but several others might return to an "underground" form of operations for the near term and reemerge later wholly or at least partially intact.

So, in short, Amsterdam was great! Crazy busy (as usual on this trip) and eye opening, to say the least. It's both extremely encouraging to see some great art being made and also saddening to think that the opportunities available in the recent past may go be going away and the community itself might feel a bit more stagnant. It will most definitely be worth a trip back to see what happens in the next few years. Good luck to them all with whatever happens!