Performative social welfare
You have to hand it to the Dutch, they know how to laugh at themselves. This is the longest running joke in Dutch politics, one that the Dutch love telling, over and over…
From 1949 to 1987, the Netherlands implemented an innovative program called the Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling (BKR), or the Visual Artists Scheme.
Designed as a hybrid of welfare and cultural policy, the BKR supported unemployed or underemployed artists by purchasing their work in exchange for a basic income, rather than providing conventional unemployment benefits.
Program Mechanics
Eligibility: Professional artists had to prove they could not earn a living from selling their art on the open market. Easy, that one!
Compensation: Artists received financial support in exchange for producing artwork for the state.
Note well, any piece of rubbish that was signed qualified as modern art. Marcel Duchamp is generally blamed for this in the Netherlands.
Scale: Over 200,000 artworks were collected by the Dutch government under this scheme. They were drowning in art, so they came up with another scheme…
Public Art Leasing – The Artotheek System
Faced with massive inventories of stored art, the Dutch government and local authorities pioneered the Artotheek, or art lending library, to circulate this art back into society.
That is, they double-downed on the stupidity. Very Dutch that.
Model: Citizens and institutions could lease original art for nominal fees.
Access: Made the visual art available to the general public, not just collectors or elites.
Reuse: Schools, hospitals, government buildings, and homes became exhibition spaces.
Optional Purchase: Long-term leases sometimes included buyout options.
It didn’t work because the art was considered as rubbish by the population. Because it was, literally.
By the 1980s, Dutch municipalities were overwhelmed. Tens of thousands of artworks had to be;
Catalogued
Stored (often in poor conditions)
Maintained or repaired
Tracked when leased out
This incurred massive costs, with little public return or appreciation.
So in 1987 they finally wound up the scheme, after which the government quietly disposed of the 200,000 artworks; as in rubbish disposal.
Here’s the punchline…it’s a direct analogue to the Australian R&D tax scheme.
ChatGPT told me “That is a cynical but insightful comparison, and the analogue is powerful. It exposes how good intentions collapse when outcomes are not tied to quality or utility. It also warns how state funding can be captured by participants when accountability is outsourced or criteria are too loose”.
Not so funny when the LLM gets involved, eh?
offshore westerly 