News of two initiatives in the Netherlands as the cultural sector acts and reacts to the cuts in cultural funding announced.

In the wake of the recent dramatic cuts in cultural funding in the Netherlands, Markus Miessen for Frieze magazine talks to Metahaven, the studio for research and design based in Amsterdam, consisting of Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk.

Metahaven talk about the manifesto 'Despotic Powers' they published recently and describe the impact of the forthcoming cuts on individual artists and on the visual arts sector and how the anti-arts rhetoric is being experienced in the Netherlands.

You can read the full Frieze blog interview here.

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Soldier of Orange

Another very different initiative invited many orchestras as possible around the world to play and record on film a one minute passage from the film score of 'Soldier of Orange', a 1977 film about the Dutch resistance in the Second World War. The tune, composed by Rogier van Otterloo, is very famous in The Netherlands and can be said to stand for the Netherlands national identity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPjNGPKcdiQ&feature=player_embedded#!

To date 45 orchestras have responded and you can see all the videos online.