When the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research invited me in 2006 to develop an art-science project about the commercialization of culture, I had no concrete idea what form such a collaborative project would possibly take, except that I wanted us to critically investigate the market ideology that over the last decades has infiltrated almost all aspects of everyday life in the Netherlands. From the 1990s onwards, large sectors of the welfare state system – notably health-care insurance, communication services and public transport – have been privatized. Education has yet been spared, but most schools and universities are nevertheless managed as a business and marketed as high-performance cars for top-talented students. Culture itself is increasingly supplied by (semi)private firms and appropriated by corporate capital, produced for a profit under the conditions of market exchange. In the arts, which have benefited from extensive government support since the 1950s, the Dutch have witnessed a remarkably rapid shift towards commercial practices and a discourse of cultural entrepreneurship. Artists are encouraged to turn themselves into brands in order to increase their revenue-earning capacity. Museums sell these brand names to cultural consumers and advertise the attendance figures of blockbuster shows (“over 50,000 visitors in the opening month”) as if they were movie theatres operating within a Hollywood-controlled distribution system.

What interests me as a social historian in this ongoing process of commercialization is its political economy. What are the underlying social dynamics and power struggles that restructure the transformation of the cultural field in the Netherlands? Does the “new order” of market economics in the non-for-profit sector challenge existing social hierarchies and power relations or does commercialization reinforce the position of the vested cultural elites? Before discussing the insights gained by our art-science exploration, which offers only the beginnings of a systemic understanding of the complex dynamics at work, let me explicate the central concerns of my research by giving a rough draft of the commercial tendencies in the not-for-profit segment of the cultural field, taking as an example the nation's major museums for modern art and centres for contemporary art. As it draws merely the contours of the commercialization process, my composite sketch will inevitably be a simplification of the actual situation, but it hints at the key issues at stake.