Culture Monitor - Annual Report 2022

The themes covered in the Culture Monitor are: professional practice; culture in the region; diversity, equality and inclusion; culture and participation; digital transformation; sustainability.

Professional practice

In recent decades, the number of self-employed workers in the Dutch labor market as a whole continued to increase, reaching 37 percent growth in 2021 compared to 2010. For the cultural and creative sector, the increase over the same period is 61 percent. This increase is heavily driven by the "Arts and Cultural Heritage" sub-sector.

Income from artistic work constitutes on average half of total income

The incomes of Dutch artists are known to average half of the total income from artistic work. Data from 2017 to 2019 show that the average personal gross annual income of artists is below that of all working people in the Netherlands. Visual occupations have the lowest income and design occupations have the highest.

Digital transformation

An important added value of online offerings and digital presence for museums and presentation institutions is international reach. Some smaller institutions see this reach as one of the main reasons for going fully online. Besides a wider international reach, the possibility of virtual experiences also increases the accessibility of events, and offers opportunities to reduce the ecological footprint. However, the big question remains how to earn from these online expressions.

Diversity, equality and inclusion

No long-term and large-scale quantitative data on representation (or diversity), equality and inclusion in the cultural sector are yet available. The monitor therefore brings together the most important (small-scale) qualitative and quantitative research on diversity, equality and inclusion in the cultural sector. It also gathers developments and wishes in the discourse on research into diversity and inclusion. With this, the Culture Monitor aims to help anyone who is looking for ways to start monitoring diversity, equality and inclusion.

Sustainability

Sustainability will become an increasingly important theme in the coming years. The need to make oneself sustainable is increasing for several reasons, as is the attention paid to the theme within national cultural policy. Many cultural organizations are already working on sustainability. There are opportunities to do this more structurally and there are various bottlenecks that can stand in the way of further sustainability. A comparison with other industries shows that companies within the sector "Culture, sports and recreation" consider themselves the least sustainable, and experience above-average obstacles. The creativity of artists can make an important contribution to awareness, change, new solutions and climate adaptation. Increasingly, artists are explicitly involved in this.

Culture in the region

To make figures about the cultural field at the regional level accessible and to provide insight into regional differences, the Boekman Foundation and Atlas Research created the Regional Culture Monitor in 2022. The Culture Monitor website includes an overview of various regional monitors.

Culture and participation

The "old" audience does not yet seem to find its way back to cultural institutions easily and the sector is worried about the future. Where big names do attract massive audiences again, lesser-known artists leave the halls empty.

Visual arts domain

Earlier, in BK Information #2 of 2021 the visual arts domain from the Culture Monitor 2021 discussed at length. Below are some things we noticed in the 2022 monitor.

The Visual Arts field is still very unequal: the pay gap between visual artists is wide; women creators are underrepresented in grants and collections; and despite increased attention to diversity, museum and institution boards remain white, highly educated and male.

Visitor numbers for art museums and institutions are still low after two years of corona, putting some institutions at risk of irreparable financialiale damage. A few bright spots mentioned: diversity and inclusion are being fought even harder; art buyers remain loyal; and digitization, since the corona crisis, is partly a godsend for museums, makers and galleries.

The number of visual artists has increased since 2017. Whereas there were 11,000 visual artists in 2017, there are now 16,000 counted. The average income of visual artists still lags behind other creative professions.

On average, visual artists earn 14,000 euros per year. By comparison; in the design professions this is 38,000 euros (2016/2019)

For detailed information, visit culturemonitor.co.uk