Eleven percent
Only eleven percent of visual artists in the Netherlands are 35 years old or younger*. This seems to be a trend that continues, because fewer and fewer students are graduating from art academies as autonomous artists, and of those who do, fewer and fewer have the desire to work full-time as autonomous artists.
The reasons for this are diverse, of course, but one of them will be that the life of an autonomous artist is perceived as too risky, too uncertain. Whereas young people were once more willing to take that risk, nowadays it is less so. The current generation of graduate artists has grown up in a different, new world. For example, they grew up largely after 9/11 and during the most recent economic crisis in which artistry was under attack and the common sense has become not to choose autonomous artistry, read: to depend on subsidies.
But there is more to it than that. In today's globalized world, there are uncertainties at every conceivable political level; the world is capricious and uncanny, with political leaders who fit seamlessly into that same profile. To choose to make a greater livelihood in that world is a more than understandable choice, and for today's graduates, perhaps not even a choice anymore, but a given. After all, working as an autonomous artist and job security do not automatically go hand in hand, while in a world in which everything is changing at a rapid pace, a degree of job security is precisely what people need.
Should we now fear a stagnant flow of new autonomous art in our midst? Perhaps. Fortunately, we can nevertheless continue to be amazed and enraptured by the art that surrounds us every day. Through the media we absorb, the museums we visit, but also simply outside in the street. Just look around you. How much art in the public space do we encounter in, say, a week? Visual art made by autonomous visual artists. More often than we think, just look at it.
Hopefully the current generation of young artists will still be able to provide our living environment with amazing and surprising objects and projects in the future, so that everyone will be able to marvel at and enjoy visual art more and more. Hopefully, in the future there will still be enough autonomous artists - and commissions - to continue realizing visual art in public spaces and elsewhere. And hopefully, the capriciousness and eeriness in the world will diminish, so that slowly but surely more and more young art students will join as autonomous artists in search of a life that is as uncertain as it is exciting.
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