Supporting New Futures in the Arts: From the Prince Claus Fund and Back

The Prince Claus Fund was founded on the conviction that art and culture are basic human needs. This guiding principle was particularly bold given that its financial backing came from the Ministry of Developmental Cooperation in the Netherlands, not the Ministry of Culture. The Fund supports cultural activities in settings that are especially challenging, such as poorer countries and countries that are at war or politically unstable.

As the director of the Fund since its inception in 1997, I created an important mission statement for the organization based on its background and goals: “Culture is a basic need.” It drew on the vocabulary of development aid work but with a twist. Building homes, supporting hospitals, providing food, and setting up tents are activities considered essential in places of need, while efforts to support art and culture in countries plagued by poverty or ravaged by war or natural disaster have too often been viewed as unnecessary or excessive.

The Fund worked to change this perception by reclaiming culture and promoting its relevance. This position inspired me to write, lecture and speak out about the essence of art and culture and the relevance of beauty (van der Plas 2006a, 2006b, 2011). It helped me to articulate arguments and reasons, to raise funds, to attract audiences, and to make, for myself, the right choices.

The Fund posits culture as a goal unto itself rather than a means. It’s not about achieving a better world through art, but that a better world embraces art and culture—so it never required an artist, artwork, or cultural activity to be socially aware and/or engaged to receive funding.

I, along with many of my associates in the Prince Claus Fund, was of the opinion that art and culture should be a sanctuary, a place to say things that cannot be said anywhere else, where people can express emotions that have no other outlet. In short, art and culture serve as a space of freedom, which should rightfully be cherished. This vision always led us in everything we did at the Prince Claus Fund.

The origins of the prince claus fund

The Dutch government established the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development in 1996 as a present to Prince Claus of the Netherlands (1926–2002), on his seventieth birthday. Prince Claus was the consort of then Queen Beatrix. He had been a long-time advisor to the Minister of Development Cooperation and his convictions were pivotal to the ethos of the Fund that bears his name. He firmly believed that “one doesn’t develop people; they develop themselves.” When it came time to name a director for the brand-new Fund, he didn’t want a development worker for the position. Rather, the Prince felt it should be someone with a background in the arts and culture, who embraced quality and equality while simultaneously understanding the historic inequality of international relations. Thus he choose me, a young art historian who had already established a career in the arts by founding and managing the Gate Foundation (an organization that promotes the intercultural exchange of contemporary art) for ten years. Like the new Fund, the Gate Foundation was committed to the equitable exchange of ideas, thoughts, and art. Gate focused on representing and presenting work by artists with diverse cultural backgrounds, including art made by immigrants to the Netherlands and Europe.

The gate foundation

When I started the Gate Foundation in 1987, I was 27 years old and had just graduated with a degree in art history with a focus on modern and contemporary art. Unemployment was high in the 1980s, but this gave me the opportunity to think freely about what I thought was important to do. During my studies, I had travelled to Japan, Hong Kong, and India and always looked into the contemporary art scenes in those countries. After my studies, I worked as an intern at the National Museum for Ethnology in Leiden, in the Japan and Korea department. The objects I had to archive were considered folklore and/or history...