The Low Countries. Jaargang 15
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The Low Countries. Jaargang 15 bron The Low Countries. Jaargang 15. Stichting Ons Erfdeel, Rekkem 2007 Zie voor verantwoording: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_low001200701_01/colofon.php © 2016 dbnl i.s.m. 10 The Low Countries. Jaargang 15 11 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. The Low Countries. Jaargang 15 12 Money is the Dross of the Earth Flemish Clav versus Dutch Polder [Erik Durnez] Quentin Metsys, The Money-Lender and his Wife, 1514. Panel, 74 × 68 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. How do the Flemish regard money? How do they deal with it? And is their financial culture essentially any different from that of their northern neighbours? Of course there's always that cliché lurking in the background: the frugal Dutchman versus the flamboyant Fleming, for instance, or the conscientious post-Calvinist as opposed to the deadbeat post-Catholic. Look a little closer and what you mostly see are similarities. The differences are there all right, but they're more subtle. Although... For starters, the Netherlands has an estimated 100,000 euro-millionaires. Southern neighbour Belgium has about 65,000. That in itself is strange and coincidental, because when you compare those numbers with the respective populations you come up with just over 0.6 percent in both cases. The Low Countries. Jaargang 15 Belgians save a great deal - ‘Belgians’, that is, not ‘Flemings’, since as far as the theme of ‘saving and investing’ is concerned there are very few sets of statistics that differentiate between Brussels, Flanders and the Walloon provinces. By early 2006 the Belgians had about 150 billion euros recorded in their savings books and savings accounts. The Dutch had saved about 225 billion euros in their books and accounts. Those figures too are very close: that's just under 15,000 euros per capita in the south and just over 14,000 euros in the north. The Flemish are rich, if you can believe the numbers. And the Dutch are, too. In many areas the general resemblance is quite striking as far as finances are concerned. The Low Countries. Jaargang 15 13 Money is no object ‘Close to your money everywhere’: a Dutch cash machine on wheels. Lucas van Leyden, The Adoration of the Golden Calf (detail from the center panel of the triptych), c. 1525. Panel, 93 × 67 cm. Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam. For a man of rank and standing money is no object. That's what Mr Bumble, Gentleman Bear par excellence, taught us many years ago. But Maarten Toonder, the Dutch cartoonist who created Bumble, passed away in 2005, and the paradigms he used for his main characters no longer apply. And Toonder himself may well have been a master of irony. Because even if we limit ourselves to linguistic usage, we find that money is a powerful presence in the life of the Low Countries. Look at the dozens of synonyms for money that the Dutch language has to offer: centen, munt, betaalmiddel, poen, pingping, duiten, cash, noppen, schijven, slappe was, vermogen, contanten, kapitaal, kluiten, bezit, spaarpot, reserve, portemonnee, frik.... The Flemish add another whole batch of terms to the list: peeschijven, sollen, censen.... Literally dozens of them. This puts the dross of the earth well above some other basic needs, although you'd be shocked to discover how many words there are in the Dutch language for faeces (drek, gier, beer, to mention only the least scabrous). The Low Countries. Jaargang 15 If we can believe the tentative hypothesis that the importance of a certain object for a particular linguistic community can be determined by the number of names that exist for it, then money must play a significant role for both the Flemish and the Dutch. Yet neither of them wants to accept that. Because money is something one just doesn't talk about. Taboo Is it really true that the Flemish don't talk about money? Sure they do: they just never talk about their own money, not concretely, not in terms of euros and cents. They're crazy about lists having to do with other people. They want to know how many billion euros Albert Frère now has, the richest man in the country and the only Belgian on the Forbes list of ‘Richest People on Earth’. But show anyone their own salary slip? Forget it. Up until recently even their partner never got to see it. No less than ten years ago an important chemical company very narrowly avoided a strike when the management decided to stop paying the workers in cash but to put the money directly into their bank accounts instead. The reason for the unrest? Such a system would have made it possible for ‘their wives’ to see exactly how much they earned. The Low Countries. Jaargang 15 14 They don't talk about it to their children, either. Children know whether their parents are in good financial shape or not, but they don't know the figures. For years the Flemish station Radio 1 has been broadcasting the interview programme Titaantjes (Little Titans) every Sunday morning. Major and minor personalities from both North and South are tossed a series of questions, following a fixed structure. One of the regularthemes is ‘money’. ‘So how much do you earn?’ is the question invariably asked by interviewer Pat Donnez. This is Sunday morning's most suspenseful moment. It's not the amount that makes the question exciting; actually the figure itself is not very interesting. What the listeners always want to know is how the featured personalities are going to handle it. Will they beat about the bush? Will you be able to see them go red in the face right through the radio? Will they start to stutter, even though they've known Jan Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664. Canvas, 40.3 × 35.6 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (Widener Collection ). the question was coming up? Have they dreamed up an original way round it? Or will they come right out and tell us what they earn? Money is fun to talk about - other people's money, that is. Not your own money. Let's face it, in this respect the Flemish are no different from their Northern neighbours. The Dutch talk openly about everything, but not about their money. They like to buy things for a song, but they never tell their friends exactly how much they ‘only’ paid for them. The weekly Elsevier had even more dreadful things to report at the end of 2005. Even in the best of relationships partners prefer not to play with an open hand. Hidden piggy banks, secret private bank accounts, clandestine expenditures, withdrawing money on the sly from the joint account, hiding bank notes, tinkering with the accumulation of bills from expensive clothing shops... even intimate partners are very secretive when it comes to money. The Low Countries. Jaargang 15 Finances are private.