Public goes public

Jun 20, 2014 | by Hannah Fuellenkemper | Art, Music

About the author

I'm a food stylist, like pugs and doomcore and will buy a book twice if I like the edition. My favourite thing about Amsterdam is its windows and a certain house on the gracht where people read and plans are hatched by candlelight.

Even though we’ve been told that the Netherlands had slouched its way out of recession, not all is as it once was. Especially in terms of funding (unless you were a part of the disproportionate police operation to raid the Valreep); a life stream crucial to the cultural sector.

Money makes the world go round

Not that a diet is necessarily a bad thing. We have grown up in a culture of more which has fed a world of waste. From bottomless sodas and our addiction to Apple products, to big government grants for another piece of inexplicable public ‘art’; it’s not a bad idea that someone checks the cheques they’re signing. The same is true for those cheques that keep the wheels of culture oiled. We’ve seen that throwing money at a production in no way guarantees that it will be good.

However, there are a lot of initiatives that could do with the chance money can afford, and now that it doesn’t flow so freely, we may lose them. We may not even know what we’re missing before its gone because we decided not to afford ourselves that night at the theatre for a production we weren’t sure we’d like anyway, and chose the overpriced beers at Bar Bukowsi.

Public wants to re-introduce the arts to a broader public.

Be a member

In the spirit of the optimist, Public helps you afford both. A to-be multi-arts initiative that wants to re-introduce the arts to a broader public, Public will work like this: 25 cultural institutions have signed up as partners to the programme and offer its members entrance up to 30 concerts, exhibitions or performances, 15 visits of which are free (for €15 a month) and the other 15 at a 50% discount. To keep its members informed of what they should not be missing, Public will circulate a weekly newsletter and a monthly magazine. Its members will have the chance to attend previews and special events and the privilege of rubbing noses with their cultured counterparts. Priceless, or, as I said, at least for only €15.

But this injection of cultural optimism may be tempered by a dose of reality. In order to kick off by its planned date in September 2014, Public needs 2,500 members to have signed up before 15 July. With a little less than a month to go, the platform has reached 33% of its target. There are, apparently, only 818 ‘culture optimists’ in Amsterdam as I write. Is that so?