ABSTRACT
Being Selected by the Government
Shortly after graduating from art school Alex applied for a government grant for visual artists. Everybody does. It would have been unprofessional not to. He applied because of the money. There are three different types of grants. 1 Each of them offers the artist an amount of money, which is equal to a year's income in a comparable profession. For an artist, however, a grant of this sort represents an income for many years to come, given the low average incomes in the visual arts. No wonder these grants are attractive.
When Alex applied he knew his chances were small. All promising graduates applied; there were four times as many applications as there were grants. So, he wasn't counting on getting one. In this respect, he was not too disappointed when he was rejected. In another and unexpected way, the rejection hit him hard. It hit him in a way no statistical calculus could mitigate. He felt rejected as an artist. Secretly he had hoped for recognition. He had hoped that the most significant organization in the Dutch art world, the government, would say: ‘All right Alex, we know that nobody is lining up to buy your drawings, but we can tell that you're a real artist. We want you to stay in the field.’
So the grants are not only attractive because of the money. In fact, Alex discovered that the symbolic attractiveness of the grants exceeded their immediate financial attractiveness. Since he did not get the grant, he continued to doubt his right to be an artist. Was he a fraud? He thought (and still thinks) that many unsuccessful artists make bad art. Little would be lost if they just left the arts. Was he one of them? The rejection lowered his self-esteem. He could not hide the doubts he harbored about his own art and that made it all the more difficult for him to find a good gallery. Had he gotten the grant it would have given him wings. The grant is also important in an objective way; for instance, if he could add that to his curriculum vitae it would certainly help convince Dutch gallery owners and collectors of his worth.
After that first attempt, Alex tried two more times, both unsuccessfully. Then he stopped. He wanted to save himself all the existential doubts associated with a rejection. This is how many artists end up going underground; they often even stop trying to crack the market. Nevertheless, ten years after leaving art school, Alex felt self-assured enough to start a new round of applications. He first applied for the ‘werkbeurs’ subsidy, which is the most prestigious and most difficult to get, and he got it. And everything else he has applied for since has also been accepted.
Looking back at this first grant, Alex now realizes that it was actually an enormous relief. Experts now took his work seriously. He had a right to be in the field. Alex even suspects that since that initial sign of recognition his artwork has improved – more than it ever did before. He felt more selfassured and he became more daring. Not all of Alex's colleagues react as strongly to this kind of rejection. But all of Alex's colleagues certainly recognize this scenario. To almost all avant-garde artists in the Netherlands government acceptance is the first and most important barrier.
Looking back at the rejections, Alex, now belonging to the group that receives government grants, wonders why his earlier work was rejected. The answer he can live with is that his work at that time was not good enough, but since then his work has improved. In the back of his mind, however, he knows that it could also be merely changes in government taste. Back when he applied for his first grant, the Dutch government was not interested in figurative art. It only developed a taste for figurative art again over the past two decades. And Alex has been producing figurative art all along. Still, he finds it difficult to admit that the government is not just interested in quality, as it claims, but that it has a taste and that it rejects work that doesn't fit in with its preferences. This is how it puts up barriers. Alex prefers not to question the government's authority; he prefers to see the government as an institution that protects the autonomy of the artist, not as one that interferes with it. That is why Alex wants to believe that his work has improved.
