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The Saw Line

Particularly striking is the large number of initiatives and organisations that have fallen below the so-called “saw line” across various funding-schemes. Some organisations, such as Nieuw Dakota (Mondriaan Fund and AFK) and Rib (Mondriaan Fund and the Rotterdam Arts Plan), have received positive assessments in multiple schemes but still fall outside the budget. At the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK), in particular, many long-supported organisations have fallen below this saw line, including P/////AKT, Beautiful Distress, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Your Revolution, Kunstverein, and De Appel. Despite positive assessments, they risk losing (part of) their funding. (*update: this text was written before appaels were decided upon)

This financing issue initially appears to be a matter of insufficient budget, but there is more at play. The introduction of the Fair Pay directive, the salary structure for contemporary arts institutions, and the phasing out of false self-employment for institutional workers—measures aimed at improving pay for cultural sector workers—have led organisations seeking multi-year subsidies to submit applications with significantly larger budgets.

The entire framework of funding regulations in general encourages growth, rationalisation, and professionalisation, while paying less attention to other needs and requirements.

Structural Precarity / Assessment Systematics

Dialogues with the field reveal a clear dissatisfaction with the lack of flexibility within subsidy frameworks to address the specific needs of organisations. Institutions are often forced to grow or meet performance demands that conflict with their own ambitions. Frequently cited criticisms include:

(1) Insufficient funding in the overall budget to support visual arts organisations;
(2) The strict formativeness of requirements
(3) A lack of dialogue concerning the structure of schemes, demands, and frameworks. The uncertainty and operating under precarious working conditions are among the most commonly voiced concerns.

A key complaint relates to the structural precarity created by the four-yearly assessment system. Each round becomes an all-or-nothing contest of winners and losers, inevitably leading to the depletion of energy and resources. Long-established practices, platforms, and archives invested over years can suddenly vanish. While positively assessed initiatives can continue for years, rejected organisations are immediately pushed to the brink, their survival endangered, as is currently the case with art platform BAK or the music theatre company Orkater.

Although development- and starter-regulations are positioned as essential components of funding the ecosystem of art organisations, measures like monitoring-talks, scaling back schemes, end of institutional life arrangements, or friction funds—when they are even part of the subsidy system—have a markedly different status. These occur largely behind closed doors and are not made public. This significantly affects how the sector handles and values potential closures or downsizing of organisations, preventing it from becoming a structural component of thinking about sustainability in arts funding.

Each application cycle introduces specific emphases, such as methodological criteria related to organisational operations (requirements for co-financing, entrepreneurship, or audience reach, for instance)—a trend initiated during the tenure of former Labour Party (PvdA) State Secretary Rick van der Ploeg—or more direct political-cultural objectives reflecting current political and ideological priorities (e.g., inclusion or local embedding, which were heavily weighted in recent cycles). Applicants are required to meet these criteria and justify them in their applications. As a result, organisations are forced to adapt to new guidelines, reorganising or rephrasing their programmes, often with uncertain outcomes.

In response, the Mondriaan Fund, through its managing director Eelco van der Lingen, professes to mediate and streamline the sector’s needs within the policy framework of the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science (OCW) for this it is in consultation with OCW and De Zaak Nu. De Zaak Nu, representing its members, advocated aligning the Kunstpodia scheme with the BIS period. De Zaak Nu nuances this stance, stating that its actual request was to harmonise application formats across national, provincial, and municipal levels, which has yet to be achieved. DZN argues that the Mondriaan Fund sets its policies independently, to which DZN can only respond retrospectively, and says to have no real influence over them.

The growing importance on the per subsidy round changing criteria, and the emphasis on concrete plans for the coming period versus proven artistic quality, has shifted the assessment focus. Attention is placed less on ideas of artistic quality defined by the sector itself and more on projected intentions assessed by committees on behalf of the funding bodies. For example: What will the organisation do, and what is its stated societal relevance? This influences the composition of organisations that are awarded funding and demonstrates the far-reaching influence and control of governmental politics in setting the frameworks. New entrants to the system must meet the established business standards within five years, but even if they are currently positively assessed, they face the same risks: the focus of assessments may shift in two or four years.

Additional pressure arises because organisations must apply to multiple subsidy streams to secure their funding. Institutions for contemporary visual art rely on municipal, national, and sometimes provincial schemes, each with its own structure and priorities. As a result, applications must be rewritten for each funding body. For organisations seeking BIS (Basic Infrastructure Subsidy) funding, the process becomes even more complex and demanding. This pressure affects both large and small presentation institutions.

This precarity is exacerbated by the interdependence of these funding streams. For instance, the Mondriaan Fund requires a 30% co-financing contribution for the Kunstpodium Breed scheme, which includes De Appel (previously 50% until 2025). The partial allocation De Appel received from the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) – only one-fifth of the requested amount due to falling below the saw line – also impacts their Mondriaan Fund allocation. According to director Lara Khaldi, this forces the organisation to scramble for alternative funding to secure their programming and survival.

This situation places a heavy burden on the team’s workload distribution, while De Appel must still meet the performance agreements made with the Mondriaan Fund, which are based on the entire requested budget. Although the fund collaborates to find solutions for the current period, questions remain about how this will affect their ability to submit a subsequent application in the same category and what consequences it will have for the institution’s continuity.

While national funds and major cities have aligned their application procedures to some extent, there is no coordination or monitoring of the synergistic effects that may arise. The repair of negative impacts often depends on municipal politics.

The expansion of the Mondriaan Fund’s Kunstpodium Breed scheme creates a middle tier with better compensation but also imposes additional performance pressures, such as requirements for visitor numbers, self-generated income, and programming standards. Human resources protocols and an expensive accountancy framework are also expected. Institutions that undertake this scaling up must often expand their housing and staff, with only four years of financial security covered.

For example, VHDG in Leeuwarden, after receiving €110,000 annually under the Basis scheme (2021) and €175,000 annually under the Pro scheme (2023), applied for €450,000 annually for 2025–28 within the Breed scheme. They were the only institution in the north region capable of making this leap and thus avoided competing with other organisations under the Basis scheme. The award requires them to double their team size and find a new location. At the time we spoke with Koen Bartijn, there were four or five open vacancies, and VHDG was negotiating with a private market party because the municipality could not provide a suitable housing accommodation. This results in increased precarity for the longer term. It is therefore uncertain whether the financial commitments and employment relationships established can be maintained after the next four years.

Remaining small is additionally no longer an option within this subsidy system. The Kunstpodium Start scheme can only be applied for three times, after which organisations are expected to progress to qualify for other subsidies. For initiatives like Marwan and Manifold, which deliberately aim to remain small for artistic reasons, this means they can no longer submit applications and will disappear from the landscape of contemporary visual art institutions. As a result, newly developed cultural capital risks being lost every few years, and the artistic significance of their contributions is ignored.

Eelco van der Lingen disputes this perspective from the field. Calls from the sector itself emphasised the need for budgets that allow everyone – including small organisations – to be fairly compensated. Kunstpodium Basis addresses this need. At the same time, there was concern that new grassroots organisations would no longer gain access to the system, potentially stifling innovation. Kunstpodium Start exists to give new players – hence the name – a chance and a voice. The Fair Practice requirements for this category are lower. However, this must not result in a diminished standard for fair practice, which is why the option is limited to five years.

The Introduction of the Fair Practice Code

A significant factor contributing to the combined effects of the sector’s rationalisation, while also illustrating how the field can influence policy, is the Fair Practice Code. All organisations seeking national or municipal subsidies must adhere to three codes. The most apparent component of the Fair Practice Code is Fair Pay, which is embedded in the artist fee guidelines and the salary structure for contemporary visual arts institutions.[3] This improvement and organisational repair were and remain urgently needed, particularly because many initiatives and organisations had self-exploited and cannibalized themselves to sustain programming and the sector following the 2011–2012 budget cuts.

While Fair Pay has ensured better compensation for some cultural workers, it falls short as a general tool for improving the position of artists. This is because the role of subsidy providers in creating preconditions is not clearly defined, and that the responsibility for it is only reluctantly or insufficiently taken on. Implementing Fair Pay requires larger budgets for the same volume of cultural output to be maintained. The struggle for Fair Pay, led by the field, was initially intended as leverage to achieve that budgetary expansion. The reality, however, shows a different picture. After years of incidental Fair Pay compensation via the Mondriaan Fund and OCW, additional funds have finally been made available to the Mondriaan Fund for institutional subsidies. Although municipalities are encouraged to facilitate Fair Pay within their budgets they are not obligated to do so. The same municipalities moreover, face significant cuts in 2026, a year referred to as the “ravine year,” while changes to national subsidy policies lead to an increase of the number of municipal applications. A number of municipal advisory committees, in their evaluation reports, have expressed their concerns about the institutions’ desired quantitative growth.

The (forced) growth ambition and the accompanying rationalisation, where organisations become increasingly dependent on subsidies rather than less, effectively reduces the number of people who can be paid to participate. It also creates growing inequality between institutions that manage to stay within the system and initiatives that, for various reasons, cannot secure their budgets.[4]

As a result, the “saw line”—originally introduced by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) as a tool to communicate to the municipality of Amsterdam the need for more resources to support all positively assessed organisations—has become depoliticised and now acts as a boomerang against the arts.[5] It functions as a pat on the back that primarily stimulates competition: next time, meet the imposed frameworks even more effectively. The governing politics is highly adept at reshaping these instruments to serve its own agenda.

Economic Standardisation and Exclusion

Through the extensive regulation of the business operations of organisations, alternative organisational forms and funding streams are being excluded. Both Jeanne van Heeswijk, visual artist and affiliated with BAK, and researcher Nathalie Hartjes, currently interim director of Nieuw Dakota , encounter these issues. These alternatives do not register within the existing frameworks and cannot be accommodated within budgeting models that define a healthy financing mix and specific relationships between – as determined – primary and secondary activities. These models sometimes contain regulations that exclude competition with “market” parties and deploy set ratios between overheads and programme costs.

So, alternative forms of income generation and collaboration are often not recognised or acknowledged as healthy business practices. Or they are categorised as “art”, thereby losing political and economic agency. This approach results in these forms of production and distribution not being taken seriously, and even creates an unjust class divide between those deemed fair and professional versus those labelled unfair and unprofessional.
Background: Ideological Infrastructure

In our discussions, it repeatedly emerged that in a context where art production is so reliant on subsidies (and therefore on politics), there is a lack of an articulated vision and a deep, ongoing exchange about the role of art production. There is no political concept of what cultural production in the Netherlands entails or what the role of culture is within the current political climate.

Directors from organisations such as De Appel, BAK, Casco, and Rib emphasise the importance and necessity of this ideological discussion to take place, as it would make explicit what is at stake.

Despite the ideological emphasis on self-sufficient entrepreneurship, this segment of the arts sector remains structurally dependent on politics. Within the concept of safeguarding the cultural sector, a structural dependency relationship exists. The methodology of assessment and the infrastructural design of culture discussed here reveal this political mediation.

This places the “Thorbeckian distance” that the state has maintained from the arts since the late 19th century in a dilemma, creating political tensions. After all, the design of the infrastructure is inherently a matter of political and ideological construction. As Anne Breure of Kunsten ’92 points out, the way this infrastructure is shaped is fundamentally a political issue.

The care for infrastructure balances between the liberal market ideal and the state’s duty of care, with the liberal concept increasingly gaining ground. This is evident in the changing policy directions of subsidy providers, who focus more on artist wage compensation and increasingly rely on budget calculations based on projects (treating the artist as a self-employed contractor under the government). This aligns with the dismantling of earlier systems like the BKR (1956–1987) and WWIK schemes (2005–2012), which provided artists with an income and were managed through Social Affairs.

In practice, this shift signifies a growing role for municipalities and cultural funds as distributors of resources to institutions and individual artists. Broadly speaking, reduced and more funnelled access to institutions and resources also worsens the position of artists, both individually and as a collective.
The alignment with the liberal economic order is also reflected in the push towards professionalisation and growth. Bureaucratic standardisation becomes the leading force in shaping the field, while opportunities for adaptation and challenge from within are increasingly locked down by formal and legal constraints.

The decreasing structural and sustainable care for smaller-scale initiatives is alarming, as this erases the non-profit sector’s role as a critical counterpoint to market thinking in political discussions. These initiatives and institutions are often created as a response to conventional economic production, not for growth but to explore value in alternative, accessible forms of labour and life organisation.

This also highlights and shows how art as a dialogical partner in shaping infrastructure is insufficiently taken seriously. What are the consequences if the artistic field were given more influence in the infrastructural design? What role should governmental politics play in this? What are the relationships between governance, the arts sector, and audiences, and what language could be used to shape those connections?

It is striking that institutions like Casco, BAK, and De Appel, which employ a more eco-systemic approach, remain subject to the same precarious regime, with no guarantees for their survival or the preservation of their archives. This demonstrates that there is still no framework to structurally recognise and support the outcomes of contemporary art at this non-museum level. It also raises the question of whether a greater potential – now being lost – exists when considering the resilient quality of Dutch art.

In addition to ensuring diversity in the arts, subsidy providers must create space for different ideas about art production without adopting the role of educator or representative. Especially in this era of political populism and rightward shifts – trends likely to further disadvantage the arts sector – an open dialogue is essential.
The call for more resources must be understood politically as a demand for a fundamental shift in vision. This is where the other principles of the Fair Practice Code become critical: the Fair Share and Fair Chain principles, which place chain responsibility at their core. This means that not only the cultural sector itself but also governance and ultimately national politics – as co-authors enabling conditions – bear responsibility for an equitable, sustainable infrastructure. This intersection of political economy and the artistic realisation of economic transactions is pivotal.

As the cultural system looks ahead to 2029, it is crucial to elevate the discussion about the infrastructural design of the arts field into a broader public debate where cultural workers are taken seriously and can contribute actively.

To achieve this, it is essential that cultural workers continue to develop their knowledge, skills, and visions to engage in this dialogue collaboratively and in an informed way. Equally important is a critical reassessment of current participatory models to ensure they remain fit for purpose.