JEREMY CLARKSON PRAISED AMSTERDAM as a cool place, “not for its windmills and tulips” but for its “Liverpudlians vomiting on Filipino prostitutes”. Sadly, this was a true enough description. But during the Covid years we saw few Liverpudlian drunks, prompting sighs of relief from residents, even if shops and pubs groaned at the loss of tourist income.
But the art world groans as well: for many of the city’s theatres, concert halls, festivals, museums and its opera house also depend heavily on tourism, and they struggled under the Covid lockdown. Closed for months, they could not sell tickets, for the loss of which revenue they are only partially compensated.
Moreover, the Corona-crisis engendered an inverse — and perhaps perverse — selective mechanism: the more dependent on government subsidies an institution is, the less it suffered from the Covid crisis, whereas those that mostly support themselves are correspondingly more affected.
In addition, we are said to be suffering from a “diversity crisis”. During the last distribution cycle, some institutions were denied subsidy for not employing enough people of colour — that concept dividing humanity into two categories, white and everyone else,
