C. Delhaye

Immigrant’s artistic practices in Amsterdam, 1970-2007: a political issue of inclusion and exclusion

This article describes how the simple participation of migrant artists in the art scene in Amsterdam over the last three decades has turned into a political issue. Their claims for inclusion led to questioning the closed character of the Western art world. This critique of the closed nature of the Western art scene and of the exclusionary structures of Western aesthetic valuation has been articulated and dealt with on two analytically different, but empirically intertwined levels: cultural policy and the art institutes. Both the redefinition of the cultural policy and the reorganisation of the field of art itself have been accompanied by—sometimes passionate—public debates. The article takes the city of Amsterdam as the unit of analysis, as the city hosts a rich variety of ethno-cultural communities and is characterised by a large and flourishing cultural apparatus. Of course, the developments enacted in the city of Amsterdam are not unique. They are one particular articulation of dynamics occurring on different scales: global, national and regional. My analysis is restricted to the domain of high culture, and focuses on two subfields: the visual arts and theatre performances. For the purpose of this article, the field of high art is of special interest as it is surrounded by a complex set of—mostly implicit—rules and mechanisms that regulate entry. These mechanisms, which affect different groups unevenly, have become the subject of major critique.

‘A commitment to cultural pluralism’. Diversity practices in two Amsterdam venues: Paradiso and De Meervaart

Cultural policy has traditionally had close ties with the construction of the society as a nation state, which has been marked by its built-in tendency towards cultural homogenisation. Post-World War II, multicultural societies pose profound challenges to these traditional forms of cultural policy. Although, in the last decades, western democracies have been designing cultural diversity plans, this does not mean that governmental policies have successfully been translated in institutional practice. In the Netherlands, mainly established cultural institutions have failed to integrate diversity into their core business. Yet, there have been a few exceptions that continue to make attempts to adapt their programmes to address new populations. In this article, we use Parekh’s view of a multiculturalism that reconciles unity and diversity, as a heuristic device that allows us to explore and examine the bottom-up diversity policies and practices of two Amsterdam-based cultural institutions: Paradiso and De Meervaart.

Depoliticising literature, politicising diversity: ethno-racial boundaries in Dutch literary professionals’ aesthetic repertoires

ABSTRACT Although still a neglected area, over the years a growing body of sociological research on the position of ethno-racial minorities in Western artistic fields has emerged. With this article we aim to contribute to this research area by focusing on ethno-racial diversity in the Dutch literary field. Through in-depth interviews, we analyse how gatekeepers mobilise specific cultural repertoires and by doing so draw ethno-racial boundaries when discussing acquisition, assessing quality and positioning themselves in the literary field. We argue that literary publishers and other professionals (selectively) employ an ‘old school’ modernist repertoire that especially values the formal aspects of literary products, by which non-white writers and publishers concerned with diversity are often positioned in an identity politics framework. Their work is said to take in a less prestigious ‘political’/’subjective’ position rather than a ‘literary’/‘universal’ one. As such, this paper informs on how gatekeepers’ practices shape the position of non-white authors in the Dutch literary field.

Fashion Exhibitions in the Netherlands: Between Visual Spectacles and Community Outreach

Abstract Recently fashion exhibitions have been blossoming in Dutch museums to the extent that they verged on becoming a trendy phenomenon. Because of this upsurge in popularity we, as academic scholars, decided to devote a seminar to this subject in the context of the Master Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The purpose of the seminar was to find out whether the popularity of museum fashion exhibitions had influenced the fashion collecting and presentation policies of the museums in recent years. The museums we studied staged a whole gamut of fashion exhibitions ranging from visual spectacles to community outreach projects. Although, these various fashion exhibitions cater to an increasingly diversified audience, they all have become attuned to the overall cultural environment audiences are living in, which is predominantly a visual culture of which the spectacular, the sensorial, and the participatory are key constituents. Dutch museums are very much in line with, even at the forefront of, museological movements that try to meet the challenges of the future. This is mainly due to the ever-growing influence of the neoliberal cultural policy on the one hand, to the open and experimental climate that has been pervading the Dutch museum world since the 1950s onwards on the other.