Art Matters (and so does Society)
Luc Devoldere | Chief Editor
When you walk through the shattered heart of Rotterdam, where now the tower blocks try to ape Manhattan, you will see a building that houses an insurance company and on which in neon letters the words of the poet Lucebert say proudly - or should that be curse: ‘Everything of value is vulnerable’.
Money matters. It is the dross of the earth, and according to Emperor Vespasian it has no smell; he came of shrewd peasant stock. But the spices in the Amsterdam warehouses in the seventeenth century did smell, and they brought in gold. ‘Private vice, public benefit’, pontificated Bernard Mandeville of Rotterdam. In Utrecht a Museum of Money is due to open on 25 May 2007. On its New Year card one can read: ‘Nil difficile volenti’. Nothing is difficult if you really want it. Raking in money, for instance. But in 1934 the Belgian Bank van de Arbeid finally went bankrupt and the ‘Ghent Model’ that the Socialist politician Anseele had shown off to the Second International lay in ruins. No-one comes away unscathed from contact with a lot of money. The philosopher says that you should have enough that it doesn't keep you awake at night. And, for the same reason, not too much.
‘Everybody knows the fight was fixed: the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That's how it goes. Everybody knows’, so the smoky voice of Leonard Cohen sings resignedly. But the Low Countries - Belgium and the Netherlands - have countered that with the welfare state. A complex and much-admired system of redistribution which now finds itself under more and more pressure, while never managing to eliminate the hidden poverty. Diamonds are not forever, not even in Antwerp. But by now everyone, from the small saver to the big banker, has become a capitalist whether they like it or not. Today the language of marketing infects everything and everyone. Even the artist looks for a market. But was Rubens any different?
This is just to inform you that the theme of this yearbook is money and business. But besides that it responds to the ever-recurring request for information on what is going on in the Low Countries. After all, there is a life beyond the homo economicus and the calculating citizen. And there the things that matter are very different.
Art matters. And so does Society. This book aims to invest long-term in the symbolic capital of the Low Countries, in its writers and painters, its artists, performers, architects and designers of the past and of today. This book is not a shareholder in the multinational company that is the Low Countries, but it is a committed stakeholder.
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