De Appel is the intellectual powerhouse of Amsterdam’s art world – or maybe it isn’t anymore, but it still has that reputation. It’s a non-commercial art space that offers a high-level (and world-renown) curatorial program, as well as a study program for gallery staff, it is the place to present contemporary art prizes and projects, and it organizes about 4-5 exhibitions a year.

De Appel is now looking for a director. This is my open application.

I believe De Appel (‘The Apple’) must fundamentally change. Currently it stands as one of the last bulwarks of the old art world, the one Dutch politicians, with overwhelming popular support, have been hacking away at. As a last-ditch concession De Appel still receives funding from the Dutch government allowing some of the old artworld diehards to subsist. I believe that institutions like De Appel were allowed to survive to avoid creating a total collapse of the Dutch art world, which was not able to come up with a new vision for the role of art in society. The coarse ‘nudging’ by the Dutch government, forcing institutions to fuse and come up with new missions and identities, did (of course) not help a bit.

What is wrong with the Dutch art world? My visits to De Appel over the last years have made this perfectly clear. The art I saw there doesn’t speak, it has nothing to offer. Nothing but the meandering explorations of the artists’ own inner world, their ‘research’ into some happenstance event or vision in their life. Any larger meaning is painstakingly avoided by the artists, who have been taught to be like that at the Rijksakademie and other art schools. It is true that some of De Appel’s programs, like ‘Vote Back’ in 2012, seemed to address the need for artistic engagement with the political stalemate, but these attempts were half-hearted, and still mainly addressed the small art crowd.

In other countries the art market, with its loaded collectors seeking cultural prestige by buying into whatever’s hot at the moment, offers solace. But Dutch art collectors are sparse, they don’t like to spend big sums on a work of art, and the art market, driven by hypercapitalism, has polarized into a incredibly expensive top segment and a bottom segment of either ‘loser’ or ‘emerging’ artists. The Dutch don’t buy this, they rather spend their money on expensive houses and furniture.

Faced with this near total failure of the Dutch art world to legitimize its existence, the question arises: what is the role of art in society? I believe artists, and the art they make, have always had a vocation for expressing the undercurrents of the collective unconscious. The freedom they have managed to create for their practice over the centuries – even now, behavior deemed unacceptable from other segments of society is still tolerated from artists – allows them to give shape to unacknowledged tendencies in the body collective. Yes, it’s the famous avant-garde function. This is why artists became such important social actors over the past century and a half. Western societies were on the move, and in many cases artists were the trailblazers of these developments.

Now the Netherlands is completely stuck, as is the rest of the West. There is not only no forward movement, there is no perception among our elites or even our populations that there should be further development. We are the ‘developed nations’, we have reached the ‘End of History’ and our only mission can be to help the ‘developing nations’ become like us. In such a situation the notion of an artistic avant-garde doesn’t make any sense.

Except that I know some artists, maybe not many but a few precious and strong ones, who don’t agree. They feel that the current political, social and cultural value systems are incapable of guiding us into the future, and with their fundamental critique they are also exploring alternatives. They are using their artistic freedom to express and develop in practice what cannot be said in the risk-averse fields of social sciences (academia), the media and within the political sphere. I can see this group of artists growing, because the pioneers are driven by positive energy, which attracts other artists to follow suit.

Now I believe De Appel must become a base for this kind of art. To start with it can be renamed Het Appel (the Appeal). It should throw open its doors to not only these artists, but also to the public at large, to start with academics, writers, researchers and other non-artists interested in the theme of social, cultural and political development. Het Appel should focus on social change, on reinstating the mission of the artistic avant-garde – on meaningful art, however polemical it may be. It should not play the role of the court’s jester, engage in politically determined debates or pander to the anxieties of the demagogically-led Dutch public. It should engage in a serious, fundamental exploration of our future, of the kind that will deeply disquiet parts of the establishment but provides hope to the more progressive sectors of our society.

In other words De Appel should take seriously the confidence invested in it by the Dutch government, and take it by surprise by seeking a real breakthrough, which might help this country out of its terrible stagnation, and onto the path of further development.

Art students, aspiring curators and gallery owners would still be welcome to Het Appel’s study programs, but would have to contribute to this fundamental change. No self-sufficient, snobbish attitudes can be accepted any longer, the art world as we know it sucks and needs to be radically transformed.