Composer and poet Samuel Vriezen writes about the struggle of art and its relationship to the public space. (Scroll down for the English version.) The immediate cause is the new Dutch minority government's plans to radically cut cultural spending, but the principles are universal and timely, indeed urgent.
I've long insisted here that the function of [culture, art, music] is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable, and that insuring quality, diversity, and liveliness in our lives — our musical lives in particular — is a serious business demanding that we call out any petty abuses of musical-partisan micro-politics as a distraction from our common cause. In any case, Samuel puts it far better than I can.
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