In 2011, a rightwing coalition forming the Dutch government announced drastic cuts in public arts funding. What had before been one of the most generous systems of public arts funding in the world, began to favour the “winners”, the great institutions admired by tourists, and the law of the market.

Our interest in the collapse of public funding for the arts in the Netherlands is not fortuitous. The Dutch and Canadian models have had parallel evolutions – both are organized around arts councils and share an interventionist ethos that is meant to mitigate the weakness of the national art market. Canada and Quebec have until now, known how to keep their substantial arts budgets intact; however, these budgets are contingent upon myriad requirements that steer art practices towards political and economic objectives. The Quebec government has already begun slashing the budget of the Conseil des arts et des lettres. Are we really shielded from the disaster that has assailed the Netherlands?

In 2014 we travelled to the Netherlands to produce a series of videotaped interviews with artists and cultural workers on the circumstances and effects of the cuts: we discussed the reasons that kept the arts milieu from blocking – or simply limiting – the cuts, the consequences of this failure, as well as the various political and artistic initiatives sparked by these upheavals.

In Winter 2015, we presented our research at articule, an artist-run center in Montreal. The exhibition evolved over time and was intended to serve as a platform where the state of the arts milieu in Canada could be discussed on the basis of what happened in the Netherlands. Screenings of documentary films, interviews and public discussions punctuated the exhibition, which closed with the launch of a publication (Le Merle) and a screening of the film that was made from our interviews. These documents also allowed us to address the whole issue of artists’ relation to the political, to liberty and to models of entrepreneurship.